Secrecy Capacity Maximization of UAV-Enabled Relaying Systems with 3D Trajectory Design and Resource Allocation

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have attracted considerable attention, thanks to their high flexibility, on-demand deployment and the freedom in trajectory design. The communication channel quality can be effectively improved by using UAV to build a line-of-sight communication link between the transmitter and the receiver. Furthermore, there is increasing demand for communication security improvement, as the openness of a wireless channel brings serious threat. This paper formulates a secrecy capacity optimization problem of a UAV-enabled relay communication system in the presence of malicious eavesdroppers, in which the secrecy capacity is maximized by jointly optimizing the UAV relay’s location, power allocation, and bandwidth allocation under the communication quality and information causality constraints. A successive convex approximation–alternative iterative optimization (SCA-AIO) algorithm is proposed to solve this highly coupled nonconvex problem. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed secrecy transmission strategy with optimal trajectory design and resource allocation compared with the benchmark schemes and reveal the impacts of communication resources on system performance.