Covert communication in hybrid microwave/mmWave UAV-enabled systems with transmission mode selection

Abstract

This paper investigates the covert communication in an air-to-ground (A2G) system, where a UAV (Alice) can adopt the omnidirectional microwave (OM) or directional mmWave (DM) transmission mode to transmit covert data to a ground user (Bob) while suffering from the detection of an adversary (Willie). For both the OM and DM modes, we first conduct theoretical analysis to reveal the inherent relationship between the transmit rate/transmit power and basic covert performance metrics in terms of detection error probability (DEP), outage probability and effective covert rate (ECR). To facilitate the transmission mode selection at Alice, we then explore the optimization of transmit rate and transmit power for ECR maximization under the OM and DM modes, and further propose a hybrid OM/DM transmission mode which allows the UAV to adaptively select between the OM and DM modes to achieve the maximum ECR at a given location of UAV. Finally, extensive numerical results are provided to illustrate the covert performances of the concerned A2G system under different transmission modes, and demonstrate that the hybrid OM/DM transmission mode outperforms the pure OM or DM mode in terms of covert performance.