Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been undergoing fast development for providing broader signal coverage and more extensive surveillance capabilities in military and civilian applications. Due to the broadcast nature of the wireless signal and the openness of the space, UAV eavesdroppers (UEDs) pose a potential threat to ground communications. In this paper, we consider the communications of a legitimate ground link in the presence of friendly jamming and UEDs within a finite area of space. The spatial distribution of the UEDs obeying a uniform binomial point process (BPP) is used to characterize the randomness of the UEDs. The ground link is assumed to experience log-distance path loss and Rayleigh fading, while free space path loss with/without the averaged excess path loss due to the environment is used for the air-to-ground/air-to-air links. A piecewise function is proposed to approximate the line-of-sight (LoS) probability for the air-to-ground links, which provides a better approximation than using the existing sigmoid-based fitting. The analytical expression for the secure connection probability (SCP) of the legitimate ground link in the presence of non-colluding UEDs is derived. The analysis reveals some useful trends in the SCP as a function of the transmit signal to jamming power ratio, the locations of the UAV jammer, and the height of UAVs.

We consider a cognitive radio system with one secondary user (SU) accessing multiple channels via periodic sensing and spectrum handoff. We propose an optimal spectrum sensing and access mechanism such that the average energy cost of the SU, which includes the energy consumed by spectrum sensing, channel switching, and data transmission, is minimized, whereas multiple constraints on the reliability of sensing, the throughput, and the delay of the secondary transmission are satisfied. Optimality is achieved by jointly considering two fundamental tradeoffs involved in energy minimization, i.e., the sensing/transmission tradeoff and the wait/switch tradeoff. An efficient convex optimization procedure is developed to solve for the optimal values of the sensing slot duration and the channel switching probability. The advantages of the proposed spectrum sensing and access mechanism are shown through simulations.

An exponential-type approximation of the first order Marcum Q-function is presented, which is robust to changes in its first argument and can easily be integrated with respect to the second argument. Such characteristics are particularly useful in network connectivity analysis. The proposed approximation is exact in the limit of small first argument of the Marcum Q-function, in which case the optimal parameters can be obtained analytically. For larger values of the first argument, an optimization problem is solved, and the parameters can be accurately represented using regression analysis. Numerical results indicate that the proposed methods result in approximations very close to the actual Marcum Q-function for small and moderate values of the first argument. We demonstrate the accuracy of the approximation by using it to analyze the connectivity properties of random ad hoc networks operating in a Rician fading environment.

This paper considers physical layer security enhancement mechanisms that utilize simultaneous beamforming and jamming in visible light communication (VLC) systems with a randomly located eavesdropper under the assumption that there are multiple light-emitting diode (LED) transmitters and one intended user. When an eavesdropper with an augmented frontend receiver is present, the jamming is very useful for preventing the eavesdropper from wiretapping the information since it is not possible to extract only the information component from the received signal if the jamming signal is random. Thus, in this paper, an optimization problem is formulated with a focus on the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio for the legitimate link, and it is solved by a heuristic method called the concave-convex procedure. Then, a ternary scheme is proposed, which is less complicated than the full (joint) scheme, and it is optimized by adopting a formulation based on an assignment problem, the solution of which is effectively obtained by the so-called tabu search procedure. Additionally, the problem of maximizing the average secrecy rate is investigated by utilizing a continuous LED model, which significantly relaxes the complication that rises from calculating the expectation with respect to the location of the eavesdropper. Our analysis and simulation results show that the proposed simultaneous beamforming and jamming strategies (both joint and ternary) are good proxies for maximizing the average secrecy rate by utilizing the statistical information on the eavesdropper’s random location.