On aerial secure and covert communication systems

This work investigates the collaborative design of secure and covert communications in uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) systems to enhance confidentiality performance. Three optimization problems are formulated for different scenarios: security-centric, covertness-centric, and joint optimization of both objectives. These problems are addressed through the coordinated optimization of user scheduling, transmit power, and UAV trajectory. To tackle the multivariate coupling and non-convex nature of the formulated problems, we employ the block coordinate descent method to decompose them into tractable subproblems, which are then convexified using successive convex approximation techniques. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed optimization and dynamic power adjustment strategies effectively enhance both secrecy and covertness performance.