Collaborative Secret and Covert Communications for Multi-User Multi-Antenna Uplink UAV Systems: Design and Optimization

Motivated by diverse secure requirements of multi-user in uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) systems, we propose a collaborative secret and covert transmission method for multi-antenna ground users to UAV communications. Specifically, based on the power domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), two g...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on wireless communications Vol. 24; no. 7; pp. 6020 - 6035
Main Authors: Xu, Jinpeng, Bai, Lin, Xie, Xin, Zhou, Lin
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York IEEE 01.07.2025
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects:
Antennas
Autonomous aerial vehicles
Beamforming
Collaboration
covert communication
Design optimization
Design parameters
Downlink
Eavesdropping
Electronic surveillance
Error detection
Forensics
Multiple objective analysis
Nonorthogonal multiple access
Optimization
Oral communication
Pareto optimization
Physical layer security
Security
Surveillance
Trajectory
trajectory optimization
Unmanned aerial vehicles
Uplink
Uplinking
Wireless networks
wiretap channel
Wiretapping
ISSN:1536-1276, 1558-2248
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Motivated by diverse secure requirements of multi-user in uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) systems, we propose a collaborative secret and covert transmission method for multi-antenna ground users to UAV communications. Specifically, based on the power domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), two ground users with distinct security requirements, named Bob and Carlo, superimpose their signals and transmit the combined signal to the UAV named Alice. An adversary Willie attempts to simultaneously eavesdrop Bob's confidential message and detect whether Carlo is transmitting or not. We derive close-form expressions of the secrecy connection probability (SCP) and the covert connection probability (CCP) to evaluate the link reliability for wiretap and covert transmissions, respectively. Furthermore, we bound the secrecy outage probability (SOP) from Bob to Alice and the detection error probability (DEP) of Willie to evaluate the link security for wiretap and covert transmissions, respectively. To characterize the theoretical benchmark of the above model, we formulate a weighted multi-objective optimization problem to maximize the average of secret and covert transmission rates subject to constraints SOP, DEP, the beamformers of Bob and Carlo, and UAV trajectory parameters. To solve the optimization problem, we propose an iterative optimization algorithm using successive convex approximation and block coordinate descent (SCA-BCD) methods. Our results reveal the influence of design parameters of the system on the wiretap and covert rates, analytically and numerically. In summary, our study fills the gaps in collaborative secret and covert transmission for multi-user multi-antenna uplink UAV communications and provides insights to construct such systems.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 14
ISSN:1536-1276
1558-2248
DOI:10.1109/TWC.2025.3550911