Aerial Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Assisted Secured Wireless Communication Systems

Integrating aerial reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (ARIS) with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) presents a significant opportunity to enhance the performance of wireless networks. This integration allows ARIS to be mounted on UAVs, providing greater configuration flexibility, establishing reliable air-ground connections, and enabling three-dimensional signal reflections. However, this integration also introduces unique challenges related to physical layer security (PLS). Addressing these security considerations is essential, given the significance of secure and reliable communication. In this paper, we investigate the PLS of UAV-enabled ARIS-assisted wireless communication systems. Our objective is to maximize the secrecy capacity of the proposed system model. We derive analytical expressions for the secrecy outage probability and probability of non-zero secrecy capacity over Nakagami-m fading channels. Additionally, we examine the impact of varying the number of UAVs in practical scenarios. Simulation results verify the analytical derivations, highlighting the critical role of selecting the optimal UAV in enhancing secrecy performance.