Energy Consumption Minimization for Secure UAV-enabled MEC Networks Against Active Eavesdropping

The integration of mobile edge computing (MEC) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has created new opportunities for efficient data processing and calculating services within the Internet of Things. However, the presence of the active eavesdropper brings serious vulnerabilities to the security calculation of terminal users (TUs), which can eavesdrop on TUs’ confidential content and compromise the quality of offloading calculation. In this paper, we propose an efficient energy consumption minimization scheme for the considered secure UAV-enabled MEC network including an active UAV eavesdropper. While ensuring security calculation for all TUs’ data, the network’s weighted energy consumption is achieved through trajectory and resource optimization, including time, local calculation and offloading calculation allocation. Due to the coupling of multi-variables and the non-convexity of the constraints, the problem is highly challenging to solve directly. To address this, an auxiliary variable is introduced to transform the problem into a more tractable form. The optimizing solution is then obtained through iterative updates, allowing for the convergence towards an optimizing solution. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme exhibits superior performance of reducing the network’s energy consumption compared to the benchmark scheme.