Secure Communication of UAV-mounted STAR-RIS under Phase Shift Errors

This paper investigates the secure communication capabilities of a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) network supported by a STAR-RIS (simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface) deployed on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), in the presence of passive eavesdroppers. The STAR-RIS facilitates concurrent signal reflection and transmission, allowing multiple legitimate users-grouped via NOMA-to be served efficiently, thereby improving spectral utilization. Each user contends with an associated eavesdropper, creating a stringent security scenario. Under Nakagami fading conditions and accounting for phase shift inaccuracies in the STAR-RIS, closed-form expressions for the ergodic secrecy rates of users in both transmission and reflection paths are derived. An optimization framework is then developed to jointly adjust the UAV's positioning and the STAR-RIS power splitting coefficient, aiming to maximize the system's secrecy rate. The proposed approach enhances secure transmission in STAR-RIS-NOMA configurations under realistic hardware constraints and offers valuable guidance for the design of future 6G wireless networks.

Energy Cooperative Transmission Policy for Energy Harvesting Tags

To sustain communication reliability and use the harvested energy effectively, it is crucial to consider energy sharing between energy harvesting tags (EHT) in a multiple access network, which are basic building blocks for the internet of things (IoT) applications. This technique also achieves higher throughput compared with the non-cooperative strategies despite energy losses occurred during energy transfer. We propose an energy cooperative communication strategy for a multiple access network of tags that depends on the harvested battery energy. We develop an optimal transmission policy for EHTs that maximizes the long-term joint average throughput using a Markov decision process (MDP) model. Simulation results show that the proposed energy cooperative policy produces improved performance than traditional policies.