Covert communication in multi-hop UAV network

Abstract

Covert wireless communication aims to hide the existence of certain transmissions in a network in order to achieve secrecy. One such network that could greatly benefit from covert communication is multi-UAV networks that operate without a fixed infrastructure or administrative support. In such a setting, the nodes communicate directly among each other through multi-hop communication and each node has imperfect channel knowledge. In this paper, the possibility and achievable performance of covert communication in a multi-UAV network are investigated, where a covert sender tries to transmit hidden information to a destination without being detected by the adversary that is part of the network. We propose a transmission method where the fundamental limits for transmitting information covertly in the presence of the adversary are derived. Our examination identifies the conditions under which the transmission method is able to successfully transmit covert information without being detected by the considered adversary with a probability of 1. The analysis suggests that the proposed method is able to achieve an accepted minimum detection error probability of 0.5, while achieving an effective covert rate of 90% at maximum transmission power of 30 dB.