UAV-Assisted Satellite-Terrestrial Secure Communication Using Large-Scale Antenna Array With One-Bit ADCs/DACs

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with large-scale antenna array constitutes a promising relaying candidate for reliable and secure satellite-terrestrial communication. Due to the limitation of energy consumption, a novel UAV architecture with one-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and one-bit digital-to-analog converters (DACs) is proposed firstly. Leveraging the additive quantization noise model, the exact closed-form expressions of both ergodic capacity and ergodic achievable secrecy rate are derived for UAV-assisted satellite-terrestrial communication systems using large-scale antenna array with one-bit ADCs/DACs. To enhance the transmission capacity and combat the eavesdropper simultaneously, maximum-ratio combining (MRC) is used by UAV to receive signals from satellite and location-based beamforming (LBB) is adopted by UAV to forward signals to destination, where the beamformer is optimized based on the derived expression of the ergodic achievable secrecy rate. Simulation results validate the accuracy of our analytical ergodic achievable secrecy rate, and demonstrate that our proposed MRC/LBB scheme has better secrecy rate than its conventional location-based counterpart.