We study the two-user multiple-input single-output (MISO) Gaussian interference channel where the transmitters have perfect channel state information and employ single-stream beamforming. The receivers are capable of performing successive interference cancellation, so when the interfering signal is strong enough, it can be decoded, treating the desired signal as noise, and subtracted from the received signal, before the desired signal is decoded. We propose efficient methods to compute the Pareto-optimal rate points and corresponding beamforming vector pairs, by maximizing the rate of one link given the rate of the other link. We do so by splitting the original problem into four subproblems corresponding to the combinations of the receivers' decoding strategies - either decode the interference or treat it as additive noise. We utilize recently proposed parameterizations of the optimal beamforming vectors to equivalently reformulate each subproblem as a quasi-concave problem, which we solve very efficiently either analytically or via scalar numerical optimization. The computational complexity of the proposed methods is several orders-of-magnitude less than the complexity of the state-of-the-art methods. We use the proposed methods to illustrate the effect of the strength and spatial correlation of the channels on the shape of the rate region.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are emerging as enablers for supporting many applications and services, such as precision agriculture, search and rescue, temporary network deployment, coverage extension, and security. UAVs are being considered for integration into emerging wireless networks as aerial users, aerial relays (ARs), or aerial base stations (ABSs). This dissertation proposes employing UAVs to contribute to physical layer techniques that enhance the security performance of advanced wireless networks and services in terms of availability, resilience, and confidentiality. The focus is on securing terrestrial cellular communications against eavesdropping with a cellular-connected UAV that is dispatched as an AR or ABS. The research develops mathematical tools and applies machine learning algorithms to jointly optimize UAV trajectory and advanced communication parameters for improving the secrecy rate of wireless links, covering various communication scenarios: static and mobile users, single and multiple users, and single and multiple eavesdroppers with and without knowledge of the location of attackers and their channel state information. The analysis is based on established air-to-ground and air-to-air channel models for single and multiple antenna systems while taking into consideration the limited on-board energy resources of cellular-connected UAVs. Simulation results show fast algorithm convergence and significant improvements in terms of channel secrecy capacity that can be achieved when UAVs assist terrestrial cellular networks as proposed here over state-of-the-art solutions. In addition, numerical results demonstrate that the proposed methods scale well with the number of users to be served and with different eavesdropping distributions. The presented solutions are wireless protocol agnostic, can complement traditional security principles, and can be extended to address other communication security and performance needs.