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IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing

Covert Wireless Communications for Augmented Reality Systems With Dual Cooperative UAVs

Yang Guo, Yuwen Qian, Ke Ren, Zhen Mei, Feng Shu, Xiangwei Zhou, Wen Wu

Published Jul 26, 2023• 38 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aided augmented reality (AR) has developed rapidly in recent years and has become a promising technology in disaster rescue, transportation, agriculture, and environmental monitoring. However, the information leakage is challenging the usage of UAV-aided AR systems with wireless communications. In this article, a dual UAVs assisted covert communication system (CCS) is proposed, where one UAV transmits the covert message to ground receivers and a cooperative UAV performs as a jammer to interfere with the malicious eavesdropper. However, flying UAVs result in fast channel fading between the UAVs and ground nodes, which reduces the covert rate of the CCSs. To maximize the average covert rate, we formulated a non-convex optimization problem under the constraint that the detection error probability (DEP) of the monitor is minimum. Furthermore, the problem is decomposed into three subproblems and transformed into convex, and these subproblems are solved alternately by designing an iterative algorithm. Simulation results reveal that the average covert rate performance of the proposed optimization algorithm can respectively achieve 16% and 40% gains than those without covert constraint and without the cooperative UAV used as a jammer.

DOI
10.1109/jstsp.2023.3299116

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Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aided augmented reality (AR) has developed rapidly in recent years and has become a promising technology in disaster rescue, transportation, agriculture, and environmental monitoring. However, the information leakage is challenging the usage of UAV-aided AR systems with wireless communications. In this article, a dual UAVs assisted covert communication system (CCS) is proposed, where one UAV transmits the covert message to ground receivers and a cooperative UAV performs as a jammer to interfere with the malicious eavesdropper. However, flying UAVs result in fast channel fading between the UAVs and ground nodes, which reduces the covert rate of the CCSs. To maximize the average covert rate, we formulated a non-convex optimization problem under the constraint that the detection error probability (DEP) of the monitor is minimum. Furthermore, the problem is decomposed into three subproblems and transformed into convex, and these subproblems are solved alternately by designing an iterative algorithm. Simulation results reveal that the average covert rate performance of the proposed optimization algorithm can respectively achieve 16% and 40% gains than those without covert constraint and without the cooperative UAV used as a jammer.
This work employs an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as a jammer to aid a covert communication from a transmitter Alice to a receiver Bob, where the UAV transmits artificial noise (AN) with random power to deliberately create interference to a warden Willie. In the considered system, the UAV's trajectory is critical to the covert communication performance, since the AN transmitted by the UAV also generates interference to Bob. To maximize the system performance, we formulate an optimization problem to jointly design the UAV's trajectory and Alice's transmit power. The formulated optimization problem is non-convex and is normally solved by a conventional iterative (CI) method, which requires multiple approximations based on Taylor expansions and an initialization on the UAV's trajectory. In order to eliminate these requirements, this work, for the first time, develops a geometric (GM) method to solve the optimization problem. By analyzing the covertness constraint, the GM method decouples the joint optimization into optimizing the UAV's trajectory and Alice's transmit power separately. Our examination shows that the GM method can significantly outperform the CI method in terms of achieving a higher average covert rate and the complexity of the GM method is lower than that of the CI method.
Wireless systems are of paramount importance in enabling ubiquitous data transmission for various Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, due to the broadcast nature and openness of wireless channels, such systems face inherent security challenges. Covert communication is an enabling technology for secure wireless communications while the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-assisted covert communication is particularly promising for enhancing covert performance. This paper investigates joint covert and secure communications in a two-hop UAV-assisted wireless system, where a source S transmits a covert message to a destination D with the help of an untrusted UAV, while being subject to detection by a warden W. We first design a covert transmission scheme for the proposed system with the considerations of both covert and secure constraints. We then develop theoretical models for the warden1detection error probability and the covert-and-secure rate (CSR) from S to D. Based on these models, we further explore the optimal power control for CSR maximization under both covertness and security constraints. Finally, numerical results are presented to validate the theoretical models and demonstrate the performance of covert and secure communications in the UAV-assisted system.
The broadcast nature of air-to-ground line-of-sight (LoS) wireless channel imposes a great challenge in secure unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications. To address this issue, this paper investigates UAV-ground communications from the physical-layer security perspective. Specifically, the investigated scenario includes a UAV serving as the base station (BS) that transmits confidential signals to a legitimate ground user, and there are multiple eavesdroppers on the ground with unknown position information. To further enhance the secrecy performance of the UAV-ground communications, an idle UAV can be employed to serve as a friendly jammer, which can transmit jamming signals to confuse the eavesdroppers. In our proposed strategy, the flying trajectory and the transmit power for both the UAVs are jointly optimized by maximizing the worst-case secrecy rate (WCSR) of the system. Considering the intractability of the formulated non-convex problem, we further provide a block coordinate descent-based iterative optimization method. Simulations verify that our proposed algorithm can significantly improve the average WCSR in comparison with the existing works.
This work employs an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as a jammer to aid a covert communication from a transmitter Alice to a receiver Bob, where the LAV transmits artificial noise (AN) with random power to deliberately create interference to a warden Willie. To maximize the system performance, we formulate an optimization problem to jointly design the UAV’s trajectory and Alice’s transmit power. The formulated optimization problem is non-convex that is difficult to tackle directly. To this end, this work, for the first time, develops a geometric (GM) method to solve the optimization problem. Our examination shows that the GM method can significantly outperforms a benchmark method in terms of achieving a higher average covert rate and the complexity of the GM method is lower than that of the benchmark method.
This work employs an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as a jammer to aid a covert communication from a transmitter Alice to a receiver Bob, where the UAV transmits artificial noise (AN) with random power to deliberately create interference to a warden Willie. In the considered system, the UAV’s trajectory is critical to the covert communication performance, since the AN transmitted by the UAV also generates interference to Bob. To maximize the system performance, we formulate an optimization problem to jointly design the UAV’s trajectory and Alice’s transmit power. The formulated optimization problem is non-convex and is normally solved by a conventional iterative (CI) method, which requires multiple approximations based on Taylor expansions and an initialization on the UAV’s trajectory. In order to eliminate these requirements, this work, for the first time, develops a geometric (GM) method to solve the optimization problem. By analyzing the covertness constraint, the GM method decouples the joint optimization into optimizing the UAV’s trajectory and Alice’s transmit power separately. Our examination shows that the GM method can significantly outperform the CI method in terms of achieving a higher average covert rate and the complexity of the GM method is lower than that of the CI method.
This paper studies the covert and secure communications in a UAV-aided untrust relay system composed of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), a base station (BS), a user and a warden (Willie). The UAV collects data from underground users, and then uploads it to the BS. The BS forwards it to the remote user. The UAV attempts to perform covert communication with the BS in the presence of Willie, while the untrust BS serving as a relay also intercepts the message from the UAV. To ensure the covert and secure communications, we first derive the average minimum detection error rate (DEP) at Willie’s location using the noise uncertainty model. We then formulate the average covert transmission rate maximization as an optimization problem with the constraints of covertness and security requirements. We further solve the optimization problem using a search method. Numerical results are provided to validate our theoretical analysis and also to illustrate the impact of power allocation factors on the covert and secure rate. Finally, we achieve maximization of the covert transmission rate in different scenarios.