Covert Integrated Sensing and Communication for UAV Systems Exploiting Prior Information

This paper investigates a covert integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) design for a multi-antenna uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) system, where a unified waveform is employed to simultaneously and covertly serve multiple users and sense a potential adversary. The communication performance is evaluated by the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) under a bounded channel uncertainty model. In contrast, the sensing accuracy is quantified via the periodic posterior Cramér-Rao bound (PCRB), which leverages the prior information of the target’s angular state. To ensure covertness while maintaining communication and sensing performance, we formulate an optimization problem that minimizes the PCRB subject to SINR threshold, beamforming constraint, and covertness guarantee. The problem is approximately solved via the S-procedure and semidefinite relaxation (SDR). Numerical results validate the proposed design and reveal the trade-off between covert communication and sensing accuracy under various system parameters.