UAV Swarm-Enabled Collaborative Secure Relay Communications With Time-Domain Colluding Eavesdropper

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as aerial relays are practically appealing for assisting the Internet of Things (IoT) network. In this article, we aim to utilize a UAV swarm to assist the secure communication between the micro base station (MBS) equipped with the planar antenna array (PAA) and the IoT terminal devices by collaborative beamforming (CB), so as to counteract the effects of the eavesdropper colluding in the time domain. Specifically, we formulate a UAV swarm-enabled secure relay multi-objective optimization problem (US
²
RMOP) for simultaneously maximizing the achievable sum rate of the associated IoT terminal devices, minimizing the achievable sum rate of the eavesdropper and minimizing the energy consumption of UAV swarm, by jointly optimizing the excitation current weights of both MBS and UAV swarm, the selection of the UAV receiver, the position of UAVs and user association order of IoT terminal devices. Furthermore, the formulated US
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RMOP is proved to be a non-convex, NP-hard and large-scale optimization problem. Therefore, we propose an improved multi-objective grasshopper algorithm (IMOGOA) with some specific designs to address the problem. Simulation results exhibit the effectiveness of the proposed UAV swarm-enabled collaborative secure relay strategy and demonstrate the superiority of IMOGOA.