Integrated beamforming and trajectory optimization algorithm for RIS-assisted UAV system

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have garnered considerable research interest in the fields of 5G and 6G wireless communication due to their remarkable flexibility and cost-effectiveness. However, the inherent openness of wireless communication environments renders these technologies vulnerable to eavesdropping. This paper presents a penalty-based successive convex approximation algorithm and a minorize–maximization algorithm to optimize the transmission beamforming vector, RIS beamforming vector, and UAV–RIS trajectory. The objective of this study was to enhance the physical layer security performance of wireless communication systems using UAVs and RISs. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed technique achieves a higher security transmission rate compared to existing techniques.