Secure Load Balancing for UAV-Assisted Wireless Networks

Abstract

The unbalanced traffic distribution is a severe problem in cellular networks, which leads to congestion and reduces spectrum efficiency. To tackle this problem, we propose an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted wireless network architecture in which UAV acts as relay to divert the traffic from the overloaded cell to its neighbor underloaded cell. Considering that UAV communications are easily eavesdropped, we use the secrecy capacity to evaluate the performance of the network. To fully exploit the advantages of the proposed architecture, we formulate a joint UAV position optimization, user association, and time allocation problem to maximize the sum-log-rate of all users in two adjacent cells. To tackle the complicated joint optimization problem, we first design a genetic-based algorithm to optimize the UAV position, and then use the branch-and-bound method to devise a low-complexity algorithm to get the optimal user association and time allocation schemes. The simulation results indicate that the proposed UAV-assisted wireless network architecture is superior to the terrestrial network, and the proposed algorithms can further improve the network performance in comparison with the other schemes.