We consider the relaying application of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), in which UAVs are placed between two transceivers (TRs) to increase the throughput of the system. Instead of studying the placement of UAVs as pursued in existing literature, we focus on investigating the placement of a jammer or a major source of interference on the ground to effectively degrade the performance of the system, which is measured by the maximum achievable data rate of transmission between the TRs. We demonstrate that the optimal placement of the jammer is in general a non-convex optimization problem, for which obtaining the solution directly is intractable. Afterward, using the inherent characteristics of the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) expressions, we propose a tractable approach to find the optimal position of the jammer. Based on the proposed approach, we investigate the optimal positioning of the jammer in both dual-hop and multi-hop UAV relaying settings. Numerical simulations are provided to evaluate the performance of our proposed method.
Radio-frequency (RF) energy harvesting (EH) in wireless relaying networks has attracted considerable recent interest, especially for supplying energy to relay nodes in Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems to assist the information exchange between a source and a destination. Moreover, limited hardware, computational resources, and energy availability of IoT devices have raised various security challenges. To this end, physical layer security (PLS) has been proposed as an effective alternative to cryptographic methods for providing information security. In this study, we propose a PLS approach for …
Cellular systems are vulnerable to jamming attacks, especially smart jammers that choose their jamming policies such as the jamming channel frequencies and power based on the ongoing communication policies and network states. In this article, we present an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aided cellular communication framework against jamming. In this scheme, UAVs use reinforcement learning methods to choose the relay policy for mobile users in cellular systems, if the serving base station is heavily jammed. More specifically, we propose a deep reinforcement learning based UAV relay scheme to hel…
This letter considers an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled relay communication system for delivering latency-critical messages with ultra-high reliability, where the relay is operating under amplifier-and-forward (AF) mode. We aim to jointly optimize the UAV location and power to minimize decoding error probability while guaranteeing the latency constraints. Both the free-space channel model and three-dimensional (3-D) channel model are considered. For the first model, we propose a low-complexity iterative algorithm to solve the problem, while globally optimal solution is derived for the c…
Unmanned aerial vehicles provide new opportunities for performance improvements in future wireless communications systems. For example, they can act as relays that extend the range of a communication link and improve the capacity. Unlike conventional relays that are deployed at fixed locations, UAVs can change their positions to optimize the capacity or range on demand. In this paper, we consider using a swarm of UAVs as amplify-and-forward MIMO relays to provide connectivity between an obstructed multi-antenna equipped source and destination. We start by optimizing UAV placement for the singl…
In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been considered for telecommunications purposes as relays, caches, or IoT data collectors. In addition to being easy to deploy, their maneuverability allows them to adjust their location to optimize the capacity of the link to the user equipment on the ground or of the link to the basestation. The majority of the previous work that analyzes the optimal placement of such a UAV makes at least one of two assumptions: the channel can be predicted using a simple model or the locations of the users on the ground are known. In this paper, we use d…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be integrated into wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for smart city applications in several ways. Among them, a UAV can be employed as a relay in a "store-carry and forward" fashion by uploading data from ground sensors and metering devices and, then, downloading it to a central unit. However, both the uploading and downloading phases can be prone to potential threats and attacks. As a legacy from traditional wireless networks, the jamming attack is still one of the major and serious threats to UAV-aided communications, especially when also the jammer is mobil…
The line-of-sight (LOS) requirement of free-space optical (FSO) systems can be relaxed by employing optical relays and optical intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs). Unlike radio frequency (RF) IRSs, which typically exhibit a quadratic power scaling law, the power reflected from FSO IRSs and collected at the receiver lens may scale quadratically or linearly with the IRS size or may even saturate at a constant value. We analyze the power scaling law for optical IRSs and unveil its dependence on the wavelength, transmitter (Tx)-to-IRS and IRS-to-receiver (Rx) distances, beam waist, and lens siz…
Due to the sustainable power supply and environment-friendly features, self-powered IoT devices have been increasingly employed in various fields such as providing observation data in remote areas, especially in rural areas or post-disaster scenarios. Generally, through multi-hop relay, the sensed data of those self-powered IoT devices are collected by the sink node which connects to the IoT backbones. However, due to the remoteness, the sink needs to be located at the border of the monitoring area where both the backbone of IoT and electrical infrastructures are accessible. Under such deploym…
The deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is proliferating as they are effective, flexible and cost-efficient devices for a variety of applications ranging from natural disaster recovery to delivery of goods. We investigate a transmission mechanism aiming to improve the data rate between a base station (BS) and a user equipment through deploying multiple relaying UAVs. We consider the effect of interference, which is incurred by the nodes of another established communication network. Our primary goal is to design the 3D trajectories and power allocation for the UAVs to maximize the dat…
In drone-assisted mobile networks, Drone-mounted Base Stations (DBSs) are responsively and flexibly deployed over any Places of Interest (PoI), such as sporadic hotspots and disaster-struck areas, where the existing mobile network infrastructure is unable to provide wireless coverage. In this paper, a DBS is an aerial base station to relay traffic between a nearby Macro Base Station (MBS) and the users. In addition, Free Space Optics (FSO) is applied as the backhauling solution to significantly increase the capacity of the backhaul link between an MBS and a DBS. Most of the existing DBS placem…
The line-of-sight (LOS) requirement of free-space optical (FSO) systems can be relaxed by employing optical relays or optical intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs). In this paper, we show that the power reflected from FSO IRSs and collected at the receiver (Rx) lens may scale quadratically or linearly with the IRS size or may saturate at a constant value. We analyze the power scaling law for optical IRSs and unveil its dependence on the wavelength, transmitter (Tx)-to-IRS and IRS-to-Rx distances, beam waist, and Rx lens size. We also consider the impact of linear, quadratic, and focusing phas…
This paper constructs a full dimensional (6D) radio map to predict the channel gain between any transmitter location and any receiver location based on received signal strength (RSS) measurements between low-altitude aerial nodes and ground nodes. The main challenge is how to describe the signal strength attenuation due to the blockage from the environment. Conventional interpolation-type approaches fail to exploit the close relation between the radio map and the geometry of the environment. This paper proposes to construct radio maps by first estimating and constructing a multi-class 3D virtu…
We consider unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted wireless communication employing UAVs as relay nodes to increase the throughput between a pair of transmitter and receiver. We focus on developing effective methods to position the UAV(s) in the sky in the presence of a major source of interference, the existence of which makes the problem non-trivial. First, we consider utilizing a single UAV, for which we develop a theoretical framework to determine its optimal position aiming to maximize the SIR of the system. To this end, we investigate the problem for three practical scenarios, in which t…
