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Covert UAV Communication by Exploiting Imperfect Cancellation Under Channel Uncertainty

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Abstract

Covert communication has emerged as a promising scheme to protect the communication process from being detected by illegal users with arbitrarily small probability. In this paper, we study the problem of hiding private messages under public signals in a remote Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) communication system, by taking advantage of the uncertainty of fading channels. Specifically, we first propose a theoretical model for such a covert transmission system, where the channel uncertainty resulting from channel estimation error is considered. Thus, imperfect cancellation of public signals can be exploited to deteriorate the detection performance of illegal users. Then, under such conditions, the performance of covertness and reliability of covert communication over fading channels is analyzed, where the detection probability and the outage probability are derived, respectively. Finally, numerical results demonstrate that the detection probability can be decreased under fading channels, which as a result raises the covertness of UAV communication.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants No. 62025110 and 62101308), and the National Key R &D Program of China under Grant 2022YFA1005000.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Tian Gao

  2. Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Zhao Chen & Liuguo Yin

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  1. Tian Gao
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  2. Zhao Chen
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  3. Liuguo Yin
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Contributions

Ms. Tian Gao: Theoretical Analysis, Numerical Simulation, Writing-Original draft preparation. Dr. Zhao Chen: System Model, Theoretical, Reviewing and Proofreading. Prof. Liuguo Yin: System Model, Editing, and Proofreading.

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Correspondence to Zhao Chen.

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Gao, T., Chen, Z. & Yin, L. Covert UAV Communication by Exploiting Imperfect Cancellation Under Channel Uncertainty. Mobile Netw Appl (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-023-02282-9

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