Joint 3-D Trajectory Design and Resource Allocation for Secure Dual-UAV-Aided Underlay Systems

Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly being employed for data collection tasks, thanks to their high mobility and easy deployment, acting as aerial platforms to collect data from ground devices (GDs). This study considers a secure underlay data collection system assisted by dual UAVs and focuses on the joint design of the UAVs' three-dimensional (3D) flight paths, the power of the jamming UAV, the power of GDs, and the scheduling of the underlay GDs in the context of an aerial eavesdropper. The highly coupled objective function and non-convex constraints make the formulated problem more complicated to solve. We first utilize an approximate lower bound on the expected spectral efficiency to streamline the solution process. The average secrecy spectral efficiency (ASSE) is maximized by jointly designing the 3D trajectory of the UAVs, the transmit power of GDs, and the user scheduling. The optimization problem is decomposed into four subproblems using block coordinate descent, with each of them into manageable convex optimization tasks by incorporating slack variables and employing successive convex approximation methods. The numerical results validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, demonstrating that the design of UAV 3D trajectories remarkably improves the ASSE of the considered system.