UAV-Enabled Covert Mobile Edge Computing Network Assisted by Multiple Friendly Jammers

IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, vol. 25, pp. 23898–23913

Abstract

The explosive growth of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has been driving adoption of mobile edge computing (MEC) technique, which mitigates the tension between computation-intensive tasks and the limited capabilities of IIoT terminal devices (TDs). To meet the growing computational demands in IIoT applications, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled MEC has emerged as a promising framework. However, stemming from the inherent openness of air-to-ground (A2G) links, the covertness of data offloading behavior in UAV-enabled MEC is exposed to considerable risks. To address this issue, we investigate a UAV-enabled covert MEC network against the detection from an illegal warden under the assistance of multiple jammers. To enhance the computation efficiency, we formulate a joint design problem of UAV trajectory, communication resource and computation resource to maximize the computation data amount while adhering the mobility, energy consumption, resource limitation and especially the covertness constraints. Then, to address the problem with complicated covertness metric under assistance of multiple jammers, we utilize the hypothesis testing theory to derive closed-form expressions of the covertness metric, which is for the first time to analysis the covertness performance with multiple friendly jammer. Subsequently, the monotonicity of the derived metric is analyzed and further utilized to simplify the original covertness constraint into an equivalent but analyzable form. Afterward, a novel convex approximation approach is developed to construct tight convex problem, enabling an efficient algorithm to attain a high-quality solution. Finally, simulations validate the effectiveness of proposed design.

Authors 4

1. Peng Wu

   Wuhan University

   Affiliation as printed

   Wuhan University

2. Xiaopeng Yuan Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University

3. Yulin Hu

   Wuhan University

   Affiliation as printed

   Wuhan University

4. Anke Schmeink Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University