Aerial Intelligent Reflecting Surface Enabled Terahertz Covert
Communications in Beyond-5G Internet of Things
Abstract
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are envisioned to be extensively
employed for assisting wireless communications in the Internet of Things
(IoT).
On the other hand, terahertz (THz) enabled intelligent reflecting
surface (IRS) is expected to be one of the core enabling technologies
for forthcoming beyond-5G wireless communications that promise a broad
range of data-demand applications. In this paper, we propose a
UAV-mounted IRS (UIRS) communication system over THz bands for
confidential data dissemination from an access point (AP) towards
multiple ground user equipments (UEs) in IoT networks. Specifically, the
AP intends to send data to the scheduled UE, while unscheduled UEs may
behave as potential adversaries. To protect information messages from
the privacy preservation perspective, we aim to devise an
energy-efficient multi-UAV covert communication scheme, where the UIRS
is for reliable data transmissions, and an extra UAV is utilized as an
aerial cooperative jammer, opportunistically generating artificial noise
(AN) to degrade unscheduled UEs detection, leading to communication
covertness improvement.
This poses a novel max-min optimization problem in terms of minimum
average energy efficiency (mAEE), aiming to improve covert throughput
and reduce UAVs’ propulsion energy consumption, subject to satisfying
some practical constraints such as the covertness requirements for which
we obtain analytical expressions. Since the optimization problem is
non-convex, we tackle it via the block successive convex approximation
(BSCA) approach to iteratively solve a sequence of approximated convex
sub-problems, designing the binary user scheduling, AP’s power
allocation, maximum AN jamming power, IRS beamforming, and both UAVs’
trajectory and velocity planning. Finally, we present a low-complex
overall algorithm for system performance enhancement with complexity and
convergence analysis. Numerical results are provided to verify the
analysis and demonstrate significant outperformance of our design over
other existing benchmark schemes concerning the mAEE performance.