Abstract

In this work, we investigate the impact of two cooperative unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based jammers on the secrecy performance of a ground wireless network in the presence of an eavesdropper. For that purpose, we investigate the secrecy-area related metrics, Jamming Coverage and Jamming Efficiency. Moreover, we propose a hybrid metric, the so-called Weighted Secrecy Coverage (WSC) and a virtual distributed multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO)-based zero-forcing precoding scheme to avoid the jamming effects on the legitimate receiver. For evaluating these metrics, we derive a closed-form position-based metric, the secrecy improvement. Our mathematical derivations and comparative simulations show that the proposed zero-forcing scheme leads to an improvement on the secrecy performance in terms of the WSC, and provides conditions for improvement of Jamming Efficiency. They also show positioning trends on the UAVs over a fixed orbit around the legitimate transmitter as well as power allocation trends for optimal secrecy.