Abstract
This paper considers the navigation of a solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for securing the communication with an intended ground node in the presence of eavesdroppers in urban environments. To complete this task, the UAV needs to not only fly safely in the complex urban environment, but also take into account the communication performance with the intended node and eavesdroppers. To this end, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem to plan the UAV path. This problem jointly considers the maximization of the residual energy of the solar-powered UAV at the end of the mission, the maximization of the time period in which the UAV can securely communicate with the intended node and the minimization of the time to reach the destination. We pay attention to the impact of the buildings in the urban environments, which may block the transmitted signals and also create some shadow region where the UAV cannot harvest energy. A Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) based path planning scheme is presented. This scheme captures the nonlinear UAV motion model, and is computationally efficient considering the randomness nature. From the generated tree, a set of possible paths can be found. We evaluate the security of the wireless communication, compute the overall energy consumption as well as the harvested amount for each path and calculate the time to complete the flight. Compared to a general RRT scheme, the proposed method enables a large time window for the UAV to securely transmit data.
Highlights
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been recognized as a new entity in the future wireless communication systems, and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can play different roles in different applications
Different from the classic path planning problem which targets on a collision-free path for a mobile robot to safely and quickly arrive at the destination [35], the problem of interest aims at maximizing the residual energy of the solar-powered UAV and total time duration in which the UAV can securely communicate with the intended node
We considered the application of using a solar-powered UAV for securing the communication with a ground node in the presence of eavesdroppers in urban environments
Summary
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been recognized as a new entity in the future wireless communication systems, and UAVs can play different roles in different applications. The NFZ considered in the current paper refers to some tall buildings in urban environments They may block the signal propagation and prevent the UAV from harvesting energy. This paper considers using a solar-powered UAV to secure the wireless communication with an intended node in the presence of eavesdroppers in an urban environment, see Figure 1. We formulate a multi-objective optimization model to maximize the residual energy of the UAV at the end of the mission, maximize the time period in which the communications between the UAV and the intended node is secure, and minimize the time to arrive at the destination To address this problem, we propose a Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) [10] based scheme. By comparing with a benchmark method, the proposed method guarantees the secure wireless communication with the intended node and prevents eavesdropping in a large time window
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