Collaborative Communication and Computation for Secure UAV-Enabled MEC Against Active Aerial Eavesdropping

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled mobile edge computing (MEC) can provide flexible computing service for terminal-devices (TDs). However, malicious active aerial eavesdroppers can perform air-to-ground eavesdropping and air-to-air attacking, which makes TDs’ tasks offloading computation more vulnerable, posing significantly secure threats to UAV-enabled MEC. To overcome this challenge, we aim to design collaborative communication and computation schemes for the secure UAV-enabled MEC system, where an active aerial eavesdropper is capable of wiretapping the tasks information offloaded from TDs and transmitting attack signals to the legitimate network. The total weighted energy consumption of the system is minimized via optimizing time allocation, transmit power, local and offloading computation bits, as well as UAV trajectory. First, considering the given number of computational tasks of TDs, a block coordinate descent (BCD)-based scheme is proposed to decompose the original multi-variables-coupling and close-form-lacking problem into several tractable subproblems that can be addressed by iterations. Next, considering that there are dynamic and random tasks arriving to TDs’ original tasks, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based scheme is proposed to maintain the stability of tasks, where the solution of computation, communication and trajectory optimization is intelligently obtained by adopting double-deep Q-learning (DDQN). Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed schemes outperform the respective benchmarks for secure UAV-enabled MEC against active aerial eavesdropping.