UAV-Aided Short-Packet Covert Data Collection

• Published in: IEEE transactions on vehicular technology Vol. 74; no. 4; pp. 6662 - 6667
• Main Authors: Yang, Fangtao, Zhao, Nan, Liu, Mingqian, Deng, Na, Nallanathan, Arumugam
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.04.2025; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Autonomous aerial vehicles; Convexity; Covert communication; covert transmission rate; Data collection; Decoding; Error probability; Estimation error; Internet of Things; Optimization; Performance evaluation; short packet; Simulation; Trajectory; Uncertainty; unmanned aerial vehicle; Unmanned aerial vehicles; Upper bound
• ISSN: 0018-9545; 1939-9359
• DOI: 10.1109/TVT.2024.3518692

This correspondence investigates an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted short-packet covert data collection, where one UAV collects private information from multiple ground Internet of Things (IoT) devices and a ground warden detects if IoT devices are transmitting. The covertness bounding is first analyzed with the consideration of the location and channel uncertainties of the warden. Then, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the minimum average covert transmission rate by jointly determining the device scheduling, the transmit power of IoT devices and the trajectory of UAV subject to the covertness constraint. We propose an iterative suboptimal algorithm based on the block coordinate descent and successive convex optimization to tackle the non-convex problem. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is validated via simulation results.