Efficient Trajectory Design and Communication Scheduling for Dual-UAV Jamming-Aided Secure Communication Networks
Xinran Wang, Peng Wu, Xiaopeng Yuan, Yulin Hu, Anke Schmeink
TL;DR
The paper tackles max-min secrecy throughput in a dual-UAV transmitter–jammer network by uncovering a collaborative successive hover-and-fly (co-SHF) structure that constrains optimal trajectories to synchronized co-hovering points with max-speed flight in between. It then reformulates the infinite-dimensional problem into a finite-dimensional one and develops a successive convex approximation algorithm with conservative anti-collision and concave objective surrogates, achieving convergence with reduced complexity. Numerical results confirm that co-SHF matches or surpasses time-discretization schemes in secrecy performance while dramatically lowering runtime, and demonstrate improved fairness and robustness to varying speeds and jamming power. The approach offers scalable, structure-driven design principles for dual-UAV coordination, with potential extensions to multi-UAV networks and more realistic propagation and CSI settings.
Abstract
We study dual-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) jamming-aided secure communication networks, in which one UAV delivers confidential data to multiple ground users (GUs), while a cooperative UAV provides protective interference against a ground eavesdropper. To enforce fairness, we maximize the minimum secrecy throughput across GUs by jointly designing trajectories and communication scheduling. The key difficulty lies in the continuous-time nature of UAV trajectories and the tight space-time coupling between the transmitter and the jammer, which jointly render the problem infinite-dimensional and nonconvex. To address these challenges, we characterize, for the first time, the structure of the optimal trajectories and rigorously prove that they follow a collaborative successive hover-and-fly (co-SHF) structure, where the two UAVs visit a limited number of synchronized co-hovering point pairs, and during each flight segment at least one UAV moves at maximum speed. Leveraging this structure, we reformulate the problem into a finite-dimensional form, without loss of optimality, over hovering and turning points, hovering durations, and scheduling. For tractability, we adopt a minimum-distance approximation of continuous anti-collision constraints and employ concave lower bounds on secrecy throughput within a successive convex approximation (SCA) method, which converges and, thanks to the co-SHF reduction in optimization variables and constraints, achieves low computational complexity. Numerical results show that, compared with time-discretization and no-jamming benchmarks, the proposed co-SHF design improves the min-secrecy and user fairness while requiring significantly less runtime.