On the Secrecy of UAV Systems With Linear Trajectory

Abstract

By observing the fact that moving in a straight line is a common flying behavior of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in normal applications, e.g., power line inspections, and air patrols along with highway/streets/borders, in this paper we investigate the secrecy outage performance of a UAV system with linear trajectory, where a UAV (S) flies in a straight line and transmits its information over the downlink to a legitimate receiver (D) on the ground while an eavesdropping UAV (E) trying to overhear the information delivery between S and D. Meanwhile, some information is delivered to S over the uplink from D, such as commanding messages to control S’s detecting operations, which can also be eavesdropped by E. The locations of S, D, and E are randomly distributed. We first characterize the statistical characteristics (including cumulative distribution functions and probability density function) of the received signal-to-noise ratio over both downlink and uplink, and then the closed-form analytical expressions for the lower boundary of the secrecy outage probability of both downlink and uplink have also been derived accordingly. Finally, Monte-Carlo simulations are given to testify our proposed analytical models.