Age of Information-Inspired Data Collection and Secure Upload Assisted by the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle and Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface in Maritime Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper proposes an age of information (AoI)-inspired secure transmissions strategy for secure transmission from the maritime wireless sensor network to the onshore base station (BS) with the assistance of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), in which eavesdroppers exist near the BS. In the proposed scheme, the secure transmission process is divided into the data collection period and the data upload period according to the time sequence to minimize the age of information (AoI) for the privacy information. In the data collection period, we design two scheduling schemes by selecting the sensor with the smallest current AoI or the largest difference in the adjacent AoI. In addition, we propose two heuristic algorithms by adopting the particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) and genetic algorithm (GA) to solve the above two problems. In the data uploading period, the uploading time minimization problem is converted to the secrecy rate maximization problem. We design an iterative optimization algorithm with auxiliary variables that are introduced to optimize the reflection coefficient of the RIS. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can reduce the average AoI by about 10 s compared to the current methods.