AOI Performance Analysis in Covert Communication-Oriented Low-Altitude Wireless Networks

Abstract

This paper investigates the age of information (AoI) performance of covert communication-oriented low-altitude wireless networks (LAWNs). In the considered system, a legitimate UAV delivers status-updating packets to multiple ground users, while a friendly jamming UAV is deployed to assist covert transmission against a malicious warden. By characterizing the covert transmission rate under air-to-ground fluctuating tworay (FTR) fading and integrating it with a queueing-theoretic framework, closed-form expressions for the average AoI of each user and that of the whole system are derived. Furthermore, the detection error probability at the warden is analyzed to explicitly characterize the covert communication constraint. Simulation results verify the correctness of the derived analytical expressions and reveal the impacts of key system parameters on information freshness and covert transmission performance.