Covert Beamforming Design for Integrated Radar Sensing and Communication Systems

Abstract

We propose covert beamforming design frameworks for integrated radar sensing and communication (IRSC) systems, where the radar can covertly communicate with legitimate users under the cover of the probing waveforms without being detected by the eavesdropper. Specifically, by jointly designing the target detection beamformer and communication beamformer, we aim to maximize the radar detection mutual information (MI) (or the communication rate) subject to the covert constraint, the communication rate constraint (or the radar detection MI constraint), and the total power constraint. For the perfect eavesdropper's channel state information (CSI) scenario, we transform the covert beamforming design problems into a series of convex subproblems, by exploiting semidefinite relaxation, which can be solved via the bisection search method. Considering the high complexity of iterative optimization, we further propose a single-iterative covert beamformer design scheme based on the zero-forcing criterion. For the imperfect eavesdropper's CSI scenario, we develop a relaxation and restriction method to tackle the robust covert beamforming design problems. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed covert beamforming schemes for perfect and imperfect CSI scenarios.

Joint Secure Communication and Radar Beamforming: A Secrecy-Estimation Rate-Based Design

“…Denote ðX ⋆ , κ ⋆ Þ as the optimal solution. The optimal W ⋆ for problem (14) can be obtained as W ⋆ = X ⋆ /κ ⋆ . In general, solving the SDR may yield a high-rank optimal W ⋆ , and there is a relaxation gap between problems ( 14) and (12).…”

“…In general, solving the SDR may yield a high-rank optimal W ⋆ , and there is a relaxation gap between problems ( 14) and (12). However, for problem (14), it can be shown that we must have a rankone optimal W ⋆ . Claim 1.…”

“…In the existing literature, there have been a pile of works investigating DFRC from different perspective, including the waveform design, resource allocation, joint beamforming, and capacity characterization, to name a few; see the recent survey papers [1,2] for the details. However, the information security aspect of DFRC is relatively less investigated, except for a few recent works [4,6,7,11,14,15]. Since DFRC employs a single waveform to simultaneously detect the target and send information to the communication user (CU), the information embedded in the waveform has a risk to leak to the malicious target.…”

“…In [15], the authors considered using a directional modulation approach to secure DFRC and proposed a fractional programming algorithm to solve the radar SINR maximization problem. In [14], the authors considered a covert communication under the radar probing waveforms; a joint design of the target detection beamformer and communication beamformer was proposed. It should also be noted that besides PLS, there are also some other works investigating privacy in DFRC, e.g., [8,28].…”

Joint Coding of URLLC and eMBB in Wyner's Soft-Handoff Network in the Finite Blocklength Regime

“…Despite a considerable amount of interesting ISAC research efforts, the fundamental performance limits, and thus the inherent tradeoffs between sensing and communication performances of optimal systems, remain unsolved. In particular, while [12]- [20] determined the information-theoretic fundamental performance limits for the asymptotic infinite blocklength regime, the focus of this article lies on the performances of real codes at finite blocklengths.…”