MIMO-Enabled Holistic Covert Flying Ad Hoc Networks

This paper investigates the problem of covert multihop transmission in MIMO-enabled UAV relay networks. A novel beamforming strategy is proposed to simultaneously maximize communication performance and suppress energy leakage towards potential eavesdroppers. By modeling the directional channel characteristics and adopting total energy leakage constraints, we formulate two optimization problems: end-to-end max-min rate maximization and total latency minimization. To solve these problems, we apply convex relaxation and derive generalized eigenstructure-based beamformers. Structural solutions are further provided for performance-critical scenarios. Simulation results verify that the proposed method achieves significant improvements in covert performance and communication efficiency compared to conventional designs.