Optimization of multi-user fairness in RIS-enhanced UAV secure transmission systems

Abstract

This paper proposes a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-enhanced unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) secure communicating scheme with multiple mutually-untrusted ground users (GUs). To resist eavesdropping, a pre-defined artificial noise (AN) is added to the intended signal at UAV for scheduled GUs in each time slot. The GU scheduling schemes, UAV trajectories and transmit power allocations in different time slots are jointly designed to ensure communication security for all GUs. To boost secrecy rate of the system while ensuring secure fairness among GUs, we conduct a joint optimization process, involving optimizing UAV trajectories, RIS phase shifts, GU scheduling schemes, and UAV transmit power splitting factors, adhering to the constraints of UAV mobility, RIS phase shifts and other related constraints. To solve this non-convex optimization, we utilize the block coordinate descent (BCD) method for problem decomposition, coupled with an iterative algorithm to optimize the resulting sub-problems. To further solve the non-convex sub-problems, we employ the variable substitution to convexify the transmit power allocation, the semi-deterministic relaxation (SDR) to convexify the RIS passive beamforming and successive convex approximation (SCA) to convexify UAV mobility constraints. Simulation results show the convergence and effectiveness of the proposed scheme, compared to the benchmark schemes, the average worst-case secrecy rate increases by 32.33%, 60.38% and 80.09‘% respectively.