Covert Low-Altitude Economy Networks

Low-altitude economy (LAE) has emerged and developed, driven by the advanced technologies and policies to provide a variety of low-altitude services, such as logistics and helicopter taxi. However, LAE suffers from the security problems due to the high probability of line-of-sight (LoS) channel. Compared with other security technologies, covert communication technology can achieve higher security by hiding the information transmission behavior. Therefore, in this article, we investigate the covert communication in LAE. First, we introduce the relevant applications and corresponding advantages in detail, and briefly introduce covert communication in LAE networks. Then, we discuss the approaches to realize covert communication in LAE. Furthermore, a case study is proposed to improve the covertness of a novel bidirectional communication scenario in LAE networks, which maximizes the weighted covert rate by jointly optimizing the user association, aircraft trajectory, and transmit power of users and aircraft. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms benchmarks. Finally, some challenges and future directions are discussed.