UAV-Assisted Covert Data Collection: When Remote Monitoring Meets Covert Communication

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted remote monitoring and data collection are prevailing applications thanks to its deployment flexibility and strong mobility. To meet security and privacy requirements, this work investigates a UAV-assisted covert data collection scenario, where the collection scheduling, three-dimensional trajectory and transmit power of the involved UAV are jointly optimized while communicating with another UAV receiver in the presence of adversaries. Taking into account the channel uncertainty at the transmitter, the optimization problem is first formulated to maximize the average covert communication rate for the worst case and the average case, respectively. Then, due to the mixed-integer non-convex nature of the optimization problem, the penalty successive convex approximation (P-SCA) scheme is introduced as a solver in association with proper mathematical approximation of some constraints. The numerical results are finally provided to validate the covertness performance of the proposed scheme, which outperforms the baseline who has no information of channel mismatch.