Improving Physical Layer Security via a UAV Friendly Jammer for Unknown Eavesdropper Location

• Published in: IEEE transactions on vehicular technology Vol. 67; no. 11; pp. 11280 - 11284
• Main Authors: Zhou, Yi, Yeoh, Phee Lep, Chen, He, Li, Yonghui, Schober, Robert, Zhuo, Li, Vucetic, Branka
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.11.2018; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Complexity; Eavesdropping; intercept probability security region; Interference; IP networks; Iterative algorithms; Iterative methods; Jamming; Military technology; outage probability; Physical layer security; Receivers; Security; Three-dimensional displays; UAV jammer; Unmanned aerial vehicles
• ISSN: 0018-9545; 1939-9359
• DOI: 10.1109/TVT.2018.2868944

In this correspondence paper, we consider an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with an air-to-ground friendly jammer assisting secure communications between a legitimate transmitter-receiver pair for unknown eavesdropper location. To enhance the reliability and security of this system, we examine the impact of the UAV jamming power and its three-dimensional (3-D) spatial deployment on the outage probability (OP) of the legitimate receiver and the intercept probability (IP) of the eavesdropper. Based on the IP, we develop a new security measure, which we refer to as the intercept probability security region (IPSR). The IPSR defines the region within a target area where the IP is less than a given threshold. We design a low-complexity iterative algorithm to maximize the IPSR subject to an OP constraint by jointly optimizing the 3-D deployment and jamming power of the UAV jammer. Numerical results show that our proposed iterative algorithm performs close to an exhaustive search with significantly reduced complexity.