Multi-Armed Bandit-Based Secure Routing in Air-Ground Integrated Networks

Air-ground integrated networks (AGINs) are promising to provide wide-coverage, high-capacity, and low-latency communication services, and thus have been attracting increasing attention from industry and academia recently. However, the open and dynamic nature of AGINs makes them vulnerable to eavesdropping attacks, posing a major challenge in ensuring end-to-end information transmission security. To this end, we propose in this paper a secure routing scheme in AGINs based on the multi-armed bandit (MAB) approach. Specifically, we first model the secrecy transmission performance for the ground-to-ground links and ground-to-air links. Based on this, we then formulate the end-to-end secure route selection problem and convert it into a budget-constrained MAB problem, where each arm is associated with a corresponding reward and cost. We further design a Secure Route Upper Confidence Bound (SRUCB) algorithm to solve the MAB problem, which copes with the scenario where the locations of eavesdroppers and jammers are unknown, and can be proven to have a bounded regret. Numerical results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed routing scheme compared to several online learning algorithms.