UAV-Enabled Covert Wireless Data Collection

This work considers unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks for collecting data covertly from ground users. The full-duplex (FD) UAV intends to gather critical information a scheduled user (SU) through wireless communication and generate artificial noise (AN) with random transmit power in order ensure negligible probability of the SU’s transmission being detected by unscheduled users (USUs). To enhance system performance, we jointly design UAV’s trajectory its maximum AN together scheduling strategy subject practical constraints, e.g., covertness constraint, which is explicitly determined analyzing each USU’s detection binary constraint induced scheduling. formulated problem mixed-integer non-convex optimization problem, challenging solve directly, but tackled our developed penalty successive convex approximation (P-SCA) scheme. An efficient initialization also presented based on hover-and-fly (SHAF) trajectory, serves as benchmark Our examination shows P-SCA scheme significantly outperforms terms achieving higher max-min average rate (ATR) all SUs UAV.