In this paper, we investigate secure unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication in the presence of multiple UAV adaptive eavesdroppers (AEs), where each AE can conduct eavesdropping or jamming adaptively by learning others’ actions for degrading the secrecy rate more seriously. The one-leader and multi-follower Stackelberg game is adopted to analyze the mutual interference among multiple AEs, and the optimal transmit powers are proven to exist under the existing conditions. Following that, a mixed-strategy Stackelberg Equilibrium based on finite and discretized power set is also derived and a hierarchical Q-learning based power allocation algorithm (HQLA) is proposed to obtain the optimal power allocation strategy of the transmitter. Numerical results show that secrecy performance can be degraded severely by multiple AEs and verify the availability of the optimal power allocation strategy. Finally, the effect of the eavesdropping cost on the AE’s attack mode strategies is also revealed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.