UAV-Aided Short-Packet Covert Data Collection

This correspondence investigates an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted short-packet covert data collection, where one UAV collects private information from multiple ground Internet of Things (IoT) devices and a ground warden detects if IoT devices are transmitting. The covertness bounding is first analyzed with the consideration of the location and channel uncertainties of the warden. Then, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the minimum average covert transmission rate by jointly determining the device scheduling, the transmit power of IoT devices and the trajectory of UAV subject to the covertness constraint. We propose an iterative suboptimal algorithm based on the block coordinate descent and successive convex optimization to tackle the non-convex problem. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is validated via simulation results.