Secrecy Performance Analysis of UAV-Assisted Ambient Backscatter Communications With Jamming

Ambient backscatter communication (AmBC) has emerged as a paradigm distinguished by its energy-efficient attributes and low-power dynamics, ideally suited to address the vast expanse of the Internet of Things (IoT). Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) deployed with flexibility can effectively establish wireless connections for isolated IoT devices through AmBC. This paper delves into the exploration of secure transmission within a UAV-assisted AmBC network, particularly addressing the challenges posed by the presence of a passive eavesdropper. Specifically, a UAV is utilized as an aerial base station to offer services to an isolated ground user, an AmBC tag transmits its information to its associated receivers by leveraging the UAV's radio frequency (RF) signals. Furthermore, a multi-antenna cooperative jammer is integrated within the system to intentionally interfere with the eavesdropper without affecting legitimate receivers. To characterize the secrecy performance, the expressions of secrecy outage probability of the air-ground link and backscatter link are both deduced leveraging a two-layer Gaussian-Chebyshev quadrature. Moreover, the asymptotic behaviors under the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime are also analyzed. Monte Carlo simulations are performed to validate the correctness and effectiveness of the analytical results.