URLLC-oriented secure communication for UAV relay-assisted network

In this paper, we investigate the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) relay-assisted secure short packet communication. The UAV acts as a decode-and-forward relay to transmit control signals from the source to the actuators in the presence of a ground eavesdropper (EV) whose imperfect channel state information is available at the UAV. Specially, non-orthogonal multiple access is adopted in our work to achieve more connections and improve the fairness of communication and the short packets are employed for data transmission to reduce the latency. Explicitly, we maximize the minimum average secrecy throughput among all actuators by jointly optimizing the UAV trajectory, transmit power and blocklength allocation, which generates a challenging optimization problem. Therefore, we propose an iterative algorithm based on block coordinate descent method and successive convex approximation technique to handle the non-convex problem. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme has better performance compared to the benchmark schemes.(c) 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.