Secrecy rate maximization for 6G cognitive satellite-UAV networks

To cover remote areas where terrestrial cellular networks may not be available, non-terrestrial infrastructures such as satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be utilized in the upcoming sixth-generation (6G) era. Considering the spectrum scarcity problem, satellites and UAVs need to share the spectrum to save costs, leading to a cognitive satellite-UAV network. Due to the openness of both satellite links and UAV links, communication security has become a major concern in cognitive satellite-UAV networks. In this paper, we safeguard a cognitive satellite-UAV network from a physical layer security (PLS) perspective. Using only the slowly-varying large-scale channel state information (CSI), we jointly allocate the transmission power and subchannels to maximize the secrecy sum rate of UAV users. The optimization problem is a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem with coupling constraints. We propose a heuristic algorithm which relaxes the coupling constraints by the penalty method and obtains a sub-optimal low-complexity solution by utilizing random matrix theory, the max-min optimization tool, and the bipartite graph matching algorithm. The simulation results corroborate the superiority of our proposed scheme.