Secure Energy Efficiency for ARIS Networks With Deep Learning: Active Beamforming and Position Optimization

Incorporating an active reconfigurable intelligent surface on an autonomous aerial vehicles (AAVs), denoted as an aerial reconfigurable intelligent surface (ARIS), introduces a novel dimension for secure transmissions. Given the constraint of limited battery capacity in AAVs, energy management emerges as a key challenge within AAV networks. In response, we propose a secure energy efficiency (SEE) transmission scheme for ARIS networks, where active ARIS is strategically deployed to enhance information security. In addition, a SEE optimal problem is formulated by considering the imperfect wiretap channel state information to optimize the active beamforming vector and the ARIS position. For this non-convex problem, we first reformulate the fractional SEE objective into an equivalent form and subsequently decompose it into two distinct subproblems: optimizing the AAV’s position and designing the active beamforming. For the AAV’s position optimization, we propose a sophisticated deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm that enables the AAV to autonomously determine the optimal ARIS position through a self-learning strategy. Regarding beamforming design, we transform this aspect into a quadratic constrained quadratic programming problem and design an alternating direction multiplier method to optimize the reflection coefficient. Subsequently, an alternating optimization algorithm is proposed to synergistically solve these subproblems. Empirical simulations validate our proposed scheme, indicating an improvement in SEE of up to 47.2%. This significant improvement underscores the efficacy of the proposed ARIS-assisted secure transmission scheme in enhancing both security and energy efficiency in AAV networks.