Joint Power and Location Design for Energy-Efficient Covert UAV Communications

Abstract

—Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been extensively deployed in wireless communication scenario. However, UAV communication faces the challenges of information leakage and energy limitation. Therefore, this paper studies energy-efficient covert communication in adversarial UAV-enabled wireless systems, where a UAV covertly delivers information to a legitimate ground receiver under the detection of a malicious detector with noise uncertainty. Our objective is to maximize covert energy efficiency, defined as the achievable covert throughput per unit of energy consumption, via the joint design of transmit power and flying location. To this end, we derive the detector’s minimum detection error probability to establish a covertness constraint. Based on this model, we formulate a three-dimensional joint optimization problem for transmit power and two-dimensional location, capturing the fundamental tradeoff among covertness, communication reliability, and energy efficiency. Through sys-tem geometric exploration, metric monotonicity analysis, and theoretical derivation, the original three-dimensional problem is reduced to a one-dimensional search over the flying angle, which enables efficient computation of the optimal UAV configuration via vectorized computation. Numerical results verify the theoretical derivations and illustrate the superiority of the joint design as well as the impact of system parameters on energy efficiency performance.