Multi-Antenna Covert Communication Assisted by UAV-RIS With Imperfect CSI

In this paper, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) are combined together to further enhance the covert communication system. In particular, a multi-antenna transmitter Alice transmits information to Bob, through UAV-RIS in the presence of an adversarial warden, whose channel state information (CSI) is not perfectly known at Alice. To simultaneously guarantee the covertness and the robustness, the minimum worst-case average covert transmission rate is maximized by jointly optimizing the beamforming vector, the phase shift vector and UAV trajectory. Moreover, the robust design of beamforming, phase shift and three-dimensional (3D) trajectory is formulated as a non-convex problem. To deal with the intractable optimization problem, an alternative optimization algorithm consisting of three subproblems is designed to deal with the joint optimization problem. The general sign-definiteness is utilized to transform the CSI uncertainty and successive convex approximation (SCA) methods are proposed to transform non-convex constraints. Besides, considering the high complexity of the proposed SCA based algorithm, we further develop a low-complexity algorithm for a special case of perfect CSI scenario, where analytical expressions of the beamforming and phase shift are derived. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the noise uncertainty for hiding legitimate communication is not necessarily as high as possible for a large equivalent receiving power threshold $\beta $ and the proposed scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art schemes.

I. Introduction

The ubiquitous air interface and open nature of wireless channels provide opportunities for illegal users to attack private information, threatening the communication security. The emerging covert communication technology in recent years provides a solution to this issue [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]. Covert communication is a secure transmission technology to hide legitimate communication by utilizing noise uncertainty [1], channel uncertainty [2], [3], cooperative relay [4], [5], and cooperative jamming [6]. The goal is to ensure that the adversarial warden, Willie, detects the legitimate transmission with a low probability.