Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are envisioned to be extensively employed for assisting wireless communications in the Internet of Things (IoT). On the other hand, terahertz (THz) enabled intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is expected to be one of the core enabling technologies for forthcoming beyond-5G wireless communications that promise a broad range of data-demand applications. In this paper, we propose a UAV-mounted IRS (UIRS) communication system over THz bands for confidential data dissemination from an access point (AP) towards multiple ground user equipments (UEs) in IoT networks. Specifically, the AP intends to send data to the scheduled UE, while unscheduled UEs may behave as potential adversaries. To protect information messages from the privacy preservation perspective, we aim to devise an energy-efficient multi-UAV covert communication scheme, where the UIRS is for reliable data transmissions, and an extra UAV is utilized as an aerial cooperative jammer, opportunistically generating artificial noise (AN) to degrade unscheduled UEs detection, leading to communication covertness improvement. This poses a novel max-min optimization problem in terms of minimum average energy efficiency (mAEE), aiming to improve covert throughput and reduce UAVs’ propulsion energy consumption, subject to satisfying some practical constraints such as the covertness requirements for which we obtain analytical expressions. Since the optimization problem is non-convex, we tackle it via the block successive convex approximation (BSCA) approach to iteratively solve a sequence of approximated convex sub-problems, designing the binary user scheduling, AP’s power allocation, maximum AN jamming power, IRS beamforming, and both UAVs’ trajectory and velocity planning. Finally, we present a low-complex overall algorithm for system performance enhancement with complexity and convergence analysis. Numerical results are provided to verify the analysis and demonstrate significant outperformance of our design over other existing benchmark schemes concerning the mAEE performance.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and Terahertz (THz) technology are envisioned to play paramount roles in next-generation wireless communications. In this paper, we present a novel secure UAV-assisted mobile relaying system operating at THz bands for data acquisition from multiple ground user equipments (UEs) towards a destination. We assume that the UAV-mounted relay may act, besides providing relaying services, as a potential eavesdropper called the untrusted UAV-relay (UUR). To safeguard end-to-end communications, we present a secure two-phase transmission strategy with cooperative jamming. Then, we devise an optimization framework in terms of a new measure − secrecy energy efficiency (SEE), defined as the ratio of achievable average secrecy rate to average system power consumption, which enables us to obtain the best possible security level while taking UUR’s inherent flight power limitation into account. For the sake of quality of service fairness amongst all the UEs, we aim to maximize the minimum SEE (MSEE) performance via the joint design of key system parameters, including UUR’s trajectory and velocity, communication scheduling, and network power allocation. Since the formulated problem is a mixed-integer nonconvex optimization and computationally intractable, we decouple it into four subproblems and propose alternative algorithms to solve it efficiently via greedy/sequential block successive convex approximation and non-linear fractional programming techniques. Numerical results demonstrate significant MSEE performance improvement of our designs compared to other known benchmarks.

This paper investigates an average secrecy rate (ASR) maximization problem for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) enabled wireless communication system, wherein a UAV is employed to deliver confidential information to a ground destination in the presence of a terrestrial passive eavesdropper. By employing an artificial noise (AN) injection based secure two-phase transmission protocol, we aim at jointly optimizing the UAV’s trajectory, network transmission power, and AN power allocation over a given time horizon to enhance the ASR performance. Specifically, we divide the original non-convex problem into four subproblems, and propose a successive convex approximation based efficient iterative algorithm to solve it suboptimally with guaranteed convergence. Simulation results demonstrate significant security advantages of our designed scheme over other known benchmarks, particularly for stringent flight durations.