Popular Matching for Security-Enhanced Resource Allocation in Social Internet of Flying Things

As the Internet of Things (IoT) is maturing and acquires its social flavor, the Social IoT enables smart devices to build inter-thing social networks without human intervention. As a new form of smart devices, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are finding their way into IoT applications. The integrated Social Internet of Flying Things (SIoFT) can provide the social-aware UAV-assisted services. However, the broadcast nature of air-to-ground (A2G) channels makes them vulnerable to being eavesdropped by terrestrial malicious users due to their strong line-of-sight (LoS) links. In this paper, we investigate to ensure the security of A2G communications when the location information of multiple potential eavesdroppers cannot be perfectly estimated. Following the “no pain no gain” principle, the terrestrial users who reuse the UAV cellular spectrum will act as friendly jammers to realize “win-win” situation. Hence, joint trajectory design, power control, and channel allocation optimization problem is formulated to maximize the average secrecy rate of UAVs in worst case. In the first stage, we utilize the block coordinate descent method and successive convex optimization method to solve the trajectory design and power control problems in an iterative manner. In the second stage, we convert the user pairing problem into a popular matching problem with externalities. Two distributed algorithms are proposed to maintain the popular matching under dynamics. Moreover, we conduct detailed analysis of the popularity, convergence, and computational complexity. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method in terms of different performance metrics.