Secure offloading for UAV-aided MEC with BC-enabled NOMA in IoT networks
Abstract
This paper embeds physical layer security (PLS) into a unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted mobile-edge computing (MEC) architecture for Internet of Things (IoT), in which backscatter devices share the uplink through a nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme. A server mounted on the UAV plays the role of an aerial base station (BS): it hovers above low-power backscatter edge devices (BEDs) and executes the tasks they deliver over backscatter communication (BC) links, while a roaming passive eavesdropper silently overhears the BED transmissions without mounting active attacks. We design an offloading protocol that strengthens transmission secrecy and derive an exact closed-form expression for the secrecy successful computation probability (SSCP) as the performance metric. The influence of the main system parameters on secrecy and latency is then examined, and Monte-Carlo simulations corroborate the analytical results.