Physical Layer Security Enhancement via Intelligent Omni-Surfaces and UAV-Friendly Jamming

Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS) are considered one of the prominent technologies to be adopted in 6G and beyond networks. However, one of the main IRS limitations is restricting the communication to the reflective dimension, which means that users located behind the IRS surface cannot benefit from it. In this paper, we make use of intelligent omni-surfaces (IOS), as an alternative to IRS, in addition to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to achieve secure communication in an Internet-of-Things (IoT) communication system. Specifically, we propose IOS-UAV assisted communication wherein an access point (AP) tries to send confidential information to a legitimate IoT device in presence of an eavesdropper. The UAV serves two fold; it acts as a friendly jammer that is trying to degrade the signal quality at the eavesdropper and as a source of energy to power up the IoT device via simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) to address the limited power available to it. We formulate an average secrecy rate maximization problem, which jointly optimizes the AP and UAV transmission powers, the UAV trajectory, IOS phase shifts and power splitting factor. The formulated problem is non-convex, therefore we exploit successive convex approximation (SCA) to tackle this issue. Simulation results show that the iterative SCA solution converges rapidly. Besides, the proposed scheme outperforms the traditional system without IOS by a gap of 140% in terms of the secrecy capacity.