Secrecy Rate Analysis Against Aerial Eavesdropper

This paper studies the threat that an aerial eavesdropper can pose to terrestrial wireless communications, from an information-theoretic point of view. The achievable ergodic and the average $\epsilon $ -outage secrecy rates with no channel state information at the transmitter (i.e., with no CSIT) are analyzed for a transmitter–receiver pair on the ground, in the presence of an aerial eavesdropper which flies a random trajectory following a smooth turn (ST) mobility model in a three-dimensional (3D) space. The ST mobility model induces a uniform distribution (of the eavesdropper’s waypoints) within the considered 3D volume. Closed-form asymptotic approximations of the achievable secrecy rates are derived based on the almost sure convergence and non-trivial mathematical manipulations. Validated by simulations, our analysis is tight and reveals that the ground transmission is particularly vulnerable to aerial eavesdropping which can be carried out in a distance without being noticed. 3D spherical regions are identified, within which the secrecy rates vanish. This sheds useful insights to protect terrestrial wireless networks from aerial eavesdropping.