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Articles

Vol. 1 No. 4 (2026)

RIS-Assisted Secure Transmission for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle and Satellite Links Under Hardware Impairments

Submitted
August 7, 2026
Published
August 7, 2026

Abstract

The integration of satellite networks with unmanned aerial vehicles has emerged as a cornerstone for next-generation communication systems, providing ubiquitous connectivity and expansive coverage. However, the inherent broadcast nature of wireless channels in these open space environments renders them highly susceptible to malicious eavesdropping. Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces have recently been proposed as a revolutionary technology to enhance physical layer security by dynamically altering the propagation environment. Despite their potential, the practical implementation of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces and transceiver modules is inevitably constrained by hardware impairments, such as phase noise, in-phase and quadrature imbalance, and amplifier nonlinearities. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of secure transmission in a reconfigurable intelligent surface-assisted satellite and unmanned aerial vehicle network subjected to realistic hardware impairments. We formulate a robust optimization problem aimed at maximizing the secrecy rate of the system by jointly designing the active beamforming at the satellite and the passive phase shift matrix at the reconfigurable intelligent surface, while explicitly accounting for the distortion noise introduced by hardware imperfections. Through an alternating optimization framework based on successive convex approximation, we navigate the non-convex nature of the objective function. Extensive theoretical analysis and system-level evaluations reveal that ignoring hardware impairments leads to significant performance degradation, highlighting the necessity of hardware-aware robust designs in practical space-air-ground integrated networks.

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