Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Enhanced Secure Aerial-Ground Communication

Abstract

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), as a revolutionary technique, appears to ameliorate undesirable propagation environment in a controllable manner, which has the potential to substantially boost security of private information in the future smart radio environment. Much recent attention has been directed to the RIS-enhanced secure communication, among which the terrestrial network scenarios are generally concerned, while the exploration of aerial-ground communication integrated with RIS remains an open issue. Furthermore, in the available research, the ideal assumption of line-of-sight channel for aerial-ground link cannot be exploited in complex urban environment. Inspired by this, we provide in this paper the secrecy rate maximization problem under a complex urban scenario, where the drone’s high mobility and RIS’s tunable capability are utilized to against the potential eavesdropper. Although the established problem is intractable to tackle, we devise an iterative algorithm combining alternating optimization and successive convex approximation method as the solution, which jointly optimizes the phase shifts, the drone’s trajectory along with transmit power for the single-user scenario. The proposed designs are also extended to the multi-user multi-eavesdropper system. Eventually, extensive simulation experiments indicate the remarkable benefits brought by our proposed scheme on secrecy performance and the necessity of optimizing phase shifts.