Strategic UAV-Assisted Game Model for Detection in Covert Communication

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are an important component of a communication system to measure, collect, store, forward, analyze, and operate covert data. Due to the advantages of rapid deployment and high mobility, it has become a promising trend to leverage the UAVs to assist Alice against Willie's detection. Nevertheless, the covert communication process between Alice and Bob is vulnerable to various detections by illegal. In this paper, we propose the UAV-assisted covert communication game (UCCG) model that focuses on the covert communication countermeasure process assisted by the UAV. Specifically, we introduce the UAVs into covert communication to interfere with Willie's detection via disguising the interference signals of the UAV as ambient noise, analyze the interaction between Alice and Willie, and derive optimal strategies for both sides. We further prove the existence of Nash equilibriums (NE) in the UCCG model. Finally, we evaluate our proposals on a covert communication testbed, and the results show that our strategy outperforms the existing work in covert throughput performance.