In recent years, due to the characteristics of high mobility, low cost, and high adaptability, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are involved in a wide range of applications. For instance, these aircrafts are involved in urban management, disaster relief, agricultural monitoring, and environmental protection using remote sensing. With the rapid development of wireless communication network technology, UAV-enabled wireless networks (UeWNs) are gaining popularity in research. Compared to UAV point-to-point communication, UeWNs can take advantage of distributed clustering to improve performance in applications. For instance, distributed UAVs in UeWNs could be deployed as relays for the construction of non-line-of-sight (NLOS) transmission links to overcome the obstacle and extend the coverage

However, the assistance of UAVs with wireless communications and networks brings a lot of new challenges in terms of transmission security, multiple access, energy efficiency, interference cancellation, network optimization, and channel estimation. How to enhance efficiency and security is a current challenge in the field that needs solving. Traditional UAV-assisted efficient and secure transmission network technologies are mostly based on point-to-point communication schemes, which are no longer suited to the widely used distributed UeWNs. As a result, it is urgent to carry out the research of distributed, efficient, and secure transmission theory and technology for the wide application of UeWNs. Innovations in network layer, media access control (MAC) layer, and physical layer are all important ways to improve the performance of UeWNs, especially combined with real application scenarios.

The aim of this Special Issue is to bring together original research and review articles discussing the current state-of-the-art techniques of distributed, efficient, and secure transmission for UeWNs. We welcome submissions including novel scientific ideas, schemes, results, and possible applications. Moreover, we highly encourage submissions including new challenges related to improving the performance of UeWNs.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Wireless communication modelling and estimation in UAV-enabled wireless networks
• Green communication and networking for UAV-enabled wireless networks, Communication and networking protocol design for UAV networking
• Physical layer security in UAV-enabled wireless networks
• UAV positioning algorithm and optimization
• Interference suppression algorithm in UAV communications
• UAV network detection technology
• Fifth generation and other next generation wireless communication technologies in UAV-enabled wireless networks
• Terahertz and mmWave technologies in UAV-enabled wireless networks
• Computation intelligence algorithms in UAV-enabled wireless networks