Securing LPWANs: A Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS)-Assisted UAV Approach

This letter presents a novel approach to enhance the secrecy performance of a low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) by integrating a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) with an unmanned aerial vehicle. The objective is to improve the secure data transmission between an IoT sensor and a gateway in LPWAN applications. Analytical expressions for the secrecy outage probability, probability of non-zero secrecy capacity, and average secrecy rate are derived for the proposed network operating over Nakagami- m fading channels. Furthermore, the impact of the eavesdropper's location is examined in practical scenarios. Simulation and numerical results demonstrate that incorporating an RIS significantly enhances the secrecy performance of the LPWAN, enabling reliable long-range transmission. These findings validate the effectiveness of the proposed system model and highlight its potential for practical implementations.