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Secure Short-Packet Transmission with Aerial Relaying: Blocklength and Trajectory Co-Design

Milad Tatar Mamaghani, Xiangyun Zhou, Nan Yang, A. Lee Swindlehurst

TL;DR

This work tackles secure short-packet communication in a UAV-relayed IoT system under passive eavesdropping and strict latency. It formulates an EAST objective with finite-blocklength SRs for uplink and downlink and nonconvex mobility constraints, and solves it via a BSCA framework that decouples blocklength and trajectory design. By convexifying nonconvex constraints with slack variables and local approximations, the method yields a tractable iterative algorithm with convergence guarantees. Numerical results show substantial secrecy-throughput gains over benchmarks and provide practical guidance on blocklength allocation and UAV maneuvering for secure SPC.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a secure short-packet communication (SPC) system involving an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-aided relay in the presence of a terrestrial passive eavesdropper. The considered system, which is applicable to various next-generation Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks, exploits a UAV as a mobile relay, facilitating the reliable and secure exchange of intermittent short packets between a pair of remote IoT devices with strict latency. Our objective is to improve the overall secrecy throughput performance of the system by carefully designing key parameters such as the coding blocklengths and the UAV trajectory. However, this inherently poses a challenging optimization problem that is difficult to solve optimally. To address the issue, we propose a low-complexity algorithm inspired by the block successive convex approximation approach, where we divide the original problem into two subproblems and solve them alternately until convergence. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed design achieves significant performance improvements relative to other benchmarks, and offer valuable insights into determining appropriate coding blocklengths and UAV trajectory.

Secure Short-Packet Transmission with Aerial Relaying: Blocklength and Trajectory Co-Design

TL;DR

This work tackles secure short-packet communication in a UAV-relayed IoT system under passive eavesdropping and strict latency. It formulates an EAST objective with finite-blocklength SRs for uplink and downlink and nonconvex mobility constraints, and solves it via a BSCA framework that decouples blocklength and trajectory design. By convexifying nonconvex constraints with slack variables and local approximations, the method yields a tractable iterative algorithm with convergence guarantees. Numerical results show substantial secrecy-throughput gains over benchmarks and provide practical guidance on blocklength allocation and UAV maneuvering for secure SPC.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a secure short-packet communication (SPC) system involving an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-aided relay in the presence of a terrestrial passive eavesdropper. The considered system, which is applicable to various next-generation Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks, exploits a UAV as a mobile relay, facilitating the reliable and secure exchange of intermittent short packets between a pair of remote IoT devices with strict latency. Our objective is to improve the overall secrecy throughput performance of the system by carefully designing key parameters such as the coding blocklengths and the UAV trajectory. However, this inherently poses a challenging optimization problem that is difficult to solve optimally. To address the issue, we propose a low-complexity algorithm inspired by the block successive convex approximation approach, where we divide the original problem into two subproblems and solve them alternately until convergence. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed design achieves significant performance improvements relative to other benchmarks, and offer valuable insights into determining appropriate coding blocklengths and UAV trajectory.
Paper Structure (11 sections, 1 theorem, 27 equations, 3 figures, 1 table, 1 algorithm)

This paper contains 11 sections, 1 theorem, 27 equations, 3 figures, 1 table, 1 algorithm.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. System Model and Assumptions
  3. Problem Formulation
  4. Proposed Solution
  5. Short-packet Blocklength Optimization
  6. UR Trajectory Optimization
  7. Convex reformulation of \ref{['p4.cst2']}
  8. Convex reformulation of \ref{['p4.cst3']}
  9. Overall Iterative Algorithm
  10. Numerical Results and Discussion
  11. Conclusion

Key Result

Lemma 1

Let $f(x,y)=\frac{1}{xy}$ with $x, y > 0$. At any given point $(x_0, y_0)$ in the domain of $f$, the following function serves as a global lower bound on $f(x,y)$Boyd2006, i.e.,

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: System model for secure UAV-SPC relaying.
  • Figure 2: EAST vs. iteration index.
  • Figure 3: Designed UR's trajectory and velocity profiles, and coding blocklengths according to different schemes.

Theorems & Definitions (1)

  • Lemma 1