Air-Ground Covert Cooperative Cognitive Radio Networks

In this paper, we design a novel unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aided covert cooperative cognitive radio (CR) scheme, where a UAV as the secondary transmitter can send its own covert signal to a secondary receiver while guaranteeing the quality of service for the primary user (PU). To accomplish the covert transmission of the secondary user, the PU’s signal is applied as a friendly interference to interrupt the detection of wardens. We first calculate the minimum detection error probability and Kullback-Leibler divergence under the finite blocklength constraint. Then, the average effective throughput maximization problem under the probabilistic line-of-sight channel is constructed by jointly optimizing the UAV’s transmit power and trajectory. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed UAV-assisted cooperative CR scheme is effective for covert air-ground transmissions against multiple wardens.