Energy consumption minimization for NOMA-based secure UAV-MEC network

Applying non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) to the mobile edge computing (MEC) network supported by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can improve spectral efficiency and achieve massive user access on the basis of solving computing resource constraints and coverage problems. However, the UAV-enabled network has a serious risk of information leakage on account of the openness of wireless channel. This paper considers a UAV-MEC secure network based on NOMA technology, which aims to minimize the UAV energy consumption. To achieve the purpose while meeting the security and users' latency requirements, we formulate an optimization problem that jointly optimizes the UAV trajectory and the allocation of network resources. Given that the original problem is non-convex and multivariate coupled, we proposed an effective algorithm to decouple the nonconvex problem into independent user relation coefficients and subproblems based on successive convex approximation (SCA) and block coordinate descent (BCD). The simulation results showcase the performance of our optimization scheme across various parameter settings and confirm its superiority over other benchmarks with respect to energy consumption.