Optimal Detection of UAV's Transmission With Beam Sweeping in Covert Wireless Networks

In this work, a detection strategy based on multiple antennas with beam sweeping is developed to detect the potential transmission of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in wireless networks. Specifically, suspicious angle range where the UAV may present is divided into different sectors to potentially increase detection accuracy by using beamforming gain. We then develop the optimal detector and derive its detection error probability in a closed-form expression. We also utilize the Pinsker's inequality and Kullback-Leibler divergence to yield low-complex approximation for the detection error probability, based on which we obtain some significant insights on the detection performance. Our numerical results show that there exists an optimal number of sectors that can minimize the detection error probability in some scenarios (e.g., when the number of measurements is limited). Intuitively, this can be explained by the fact that there exists an optimal accuracy of the telescope used to find an object in the sky within limited time period.