Joint UAV 3D deployment and sensor power allocation for energy-efficient and secure data collection

Unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs) are advantageous for data collection in wireless sensor networks(WSNs) due to its low cost of use,flexible deployment,controllable mobility,etc. However,how to cope with the inherent issues of energy limitation and data security in the WSNs is challenging in such an application paradigm. To this end,based on the framework of physical layer security,an optimization problem for maximizing secrecy energy efficiency(EE) of data collection is formulated,which focuses on optimizing the UAV’s positions and the sensors’ transmit power. To overcome the difficulties in solving the optimization problem,the methods of fractional programming and successive convex approximation are then adopted to gradually transform the original problem into a series of tractable subproblems which are solved in an iterative manner. As shown in simulation results,by the joint designs in the spatial domain of UAV and the power domain of sensors,the proposed algorithm achieves a significant improvement of secrecy EE and rate.