UAV Relay Assisted Cooperative Jamming for Covert Communications Over Rician Fading

Abstract

Covert communication can hide the legitimate transmission from unauthorized eavesdropping. Benefiting from the deployment flexibility, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be utilized to enhance communication confidentiality. In this correspondence, we consider a covert communication network with the aid of a full-duplex UAV relay, which is employed to help the transmission and confuse the warden. The warden adopts a radiometer to detect the covert transmission. We first find the optimal detection threshold and calculate the minimum detection error probability. Furthermore, a closed-form expression of outage probability via UAV relaying is derived over Rician fading. Then, a power optimization problem is formulated to maximize the effective convert throughput with covertness constraint. Numerical results illustrate that the cooperative jamming can disrupt the warden, and the optimal power tradeoff can guarantee the covert transmission effectively.