An HAP and UAVs Collaboration Framework for Uplink Secure Rate Maximization in NOMA-Enabled IoT Networks

• Published in: Remote sensing (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 14; no. 18; p. 4501
• Main Authors: Wang, Dawei, Wu, Menghan, He, Yixin, Pang, Linna, Xu, Qian, Zhang, Ruonan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.09.2022
• Subjects: Algorithms; Altitude; Clusters; Collaboration; Communication; Computer architecture; Eavesdropping; Efficiency; High altitude; high-altitude platform (HAP); Internet of Things; Internet of Things (IoT); non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA); Nonorthogonal multiple access; Optimization; Quality of service; Remote sensing; secure rate; Spectrum allocation; Unmanned aerial vehicles; unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs); Uplinking
• ISSN: 2072-4292; 2072-4292
• DOI: 10.3390/rs14184501

In this paper, we propose a high-altitude platform (HAP) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) collaboration framework in non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) networks with the presence of an eavesdropping UAV. For the considered framework, we investigate the uplink secure transmission by optimizing channel allocation from UAVs to HAP, users’ power, and UAVs’ three-dimensional (3D) position. To solve this non-convex problem, we adopt the K-means cluster pair algorithm to divide paired users into different groups and each cluster can be served by a corresponding UAV. Then, the formulated optimization problem is decoupled into three subproblems and tackled iteratively based on the block coordinate descent (BCD) algorithm. Finally, simulation results verify that the proposed network architecture can achieve a higher secure rate, faster convergence evolution, and lower complexity in comparison with the current works.