Hybrid Beamforming Design for Covert Multicast mmWave Massive MIMO Communications

Abstract

Rather than considering only one legitimate user as in the existing works, we investigate multiple legitimate users served by Alice using multicast millimeter wave communications in this paper. Hybrid beamformers for the max-min fairness problem are designed to maximize the minimum covert rate between Alice and the legitimate users subject to the power constraint for confidential signal (CS) and the covertness constraint. In particular, the fully-digital beamformers for the CS and jamming signal are designed by temporarily neglecting the hardware constraints from the constant envelop for phase shifters and the limited number of RF chains, where a semi-definite programming-based method and a successive convex approximation (SCA)-based method are proposed. To approach the fully-digital beamformers, hybrid beamformers are designed subject to the hardware constraints, where an alternating minimization method is proposed to iteratively optimize the analog and digital beamformers. Simulation results show that the proposed methods can achieve better covert communication performance than the existing methods.