# Secrecy and Covert Communications against UAV Surveillance via Multi-Hop Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.09197 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09197/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 21 Oct 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Graph Koopman Autoencoder for Predictive Covert Communication Against UAV Surveillance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09426/) (2024)
- [Agentic Satellite-Augmented Low-Altitude Economy and Terrestrial Networks: A Survey on Generative Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14633/) (2025)
- [Decentralized Covert Routing in Heterogeneous Networks Using Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10087/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The deployment of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for surveillance and monitoring gives rise to the confidential information leakage challenge in both civilian and military environments. The security and covert communication problems for a pair of terrestrial nodes against UAV surveillance are considered in this paper. To overcome the information leakage and increase the transmission reliability, a multi-hop relaying strategy is deployed. We aim to optimize the throughput by carefully designing the parameters of the multi-hop network, including the coding rates, transmit power, and required number of hops. In the secure transmission scenario, the expressions of the connection probability and secrecy outage probability of an end-to-end path are derived and the closed-form expressions of the optimal transmit power, transmission and secrecy rates under a fixed number of hops are obtained. In the covert communication problem, under the constraints of the detection error rate and aggregate power, the sub-problem of transmit power allocation is a convex problem and can be solved numerically. Simulation shows the impact of network settings on the transmission performance. The trade-off between secrecy/covertness and efficiency of the multi-hop transmission is discussed which leads to the existence of the optimal number of hops.