A Two-Stage Game Framework to Secure Transmission in Two-Tier UAV Networks

The multi-UAV network is promising to extend conventional networks by providing broader coverage, and better reliability. Nevertheless, the broadcast nature of wireless signals, and the broader coverage expose multi-UAV communications to the threats of passive eavesdroppers. Recent studies mainly focus on securing a single legitimate link, or communications between a UAV, and multiple ground users in one/two-UAV-aided networks, while the physical layer secrecy analysis for hierarchical multi-UAV networks is underexplored. In this paper, we investigate a general two-tier UAV network consisting of multiple UAV transmitters (UTs), and multiple UAV receivers (URs) in the presence of multiple UAV eavesdroppers (UEs). To protect all legitimate UT-UR links against UEs at the physical layer, we design a two-stage framework consisting of a UT-UR association stage, and a cooperative transmission stage. Specifically, we formulate the secure transmission problem into a many-to-one matching game followed by an overlapping coalition formation (OCF) game, taking into account the limited capabilities, and the throughput requirements of URs, as well as the transmission power constraints of UTs. A matching algorithm, and an OCF algorithm are proposed to solve these two sequential games whose convergences, and stabilities are guaranteed theoretically. Simulation results show the superiority of our algorithms, and the effectiveness of our two-stage game framework in the terms of secrecy performance.