Joint Hovering Height, Power, and Rate Optimization for Air-to-Ground UAV-RSMA Covert Communications

In this paper, we investigate covert communications for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-aided rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) system in which the UAV transmits to the covert and public users separately while shielding covert transmissions from a warden. Under the RSMA principles, the messages of the covert and public users are converted to common and private streams for air-to-ground transmissions. Subject to the quality of service (QoS) requirements of the public user and covertness constraint of the UAV-aid RSMA (UAV-RSMA) system, the aim of covert communication design is to maximize the covert rate by jointly optimizing the transmit power allocation, common rate allocation, and UAV hovering height, which each contribute to the uncertainty of the warden’s binary decision and attempts to enhance communication performance. To address the non-convex covert rate maximization problem in addition to the highly coupled system parameters, we decouple the original problem into three subproblems of transmit power allocation, common rate allocation, and UAV hovering height. We derive the optimal solutions for each of the subproblems of the transmit power and rate allocations and formulate a signomial programming problem to tackle UAV hovering height optimization. The simulation results indicate the superior covert rate performance achieved by the proposed AO algorithm and demonstrate that the proposed UAV-RSMA scheme achieves a higher covert rate than the benchmark schemes.