USV Trajectory Optimization Based Legitimate Maritime Wireless Surveillance

To facilitate detection of vessels involved in potentially illegal maritime activities and uphold maritime security, wireless surveillance of suspicious wireless links through eavesdropping technology without requiring physical proximity has emerged as a promising paradigm. Nevertheless, effective wireless surveillance of maritime wireless links confronts critical challenges, such as the highly dynamic and complex ocean environment and the risk of being detected during close-range surveillance. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a cooperative maritime wireless surveillance scheme for suspicious communication links, utilizing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) jamming to assist unmanned surface vehicle (USV) monitoring. Specifically, a proactive eavesdropping framework is firstly established, wherein a UAV and a USV collaborate to monitor target link. The UAV transmits beamforming jamming signals to degrade suspicious communications, while the USV conducts eavesdropping to extract valuable information. To maximize the average monitoring rate, an optimization problem is formulated to optimize the trajectory of USV, subject to the mobility constraints during the monitoring process. Given the nonconvex nature of the problem arising from coupled variables and nonlinear constraints, a successive convex approximation (SCA) based algorithm is designed to solve the original problem. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms conventional methods.