A larger feasible region always better for movable-antenna-aided covert communications?
Author Identifier (ORCID)
Abstract
In this work, we consider movable-antenna (MA)-aided covert communications, where MA is exploited at a transmitter to potentially enhance the channel quality to a receiver subject to a covertness constraint. We first derive the warden’s minimum detection error probability and show that it depends on the MA feasible region in a non-monotonic manner. We then formulate a joint optimization problem over the transmit power, antenna positions, and feasible region size. Our analysis shows that, unlike in conventional point-to-point systems, enlarging the feasible region does not necessarily improve the covert communication performance, since the region size also affects the covertness constraint through the warden’s detection performance. Based on this result, we develop a differential evolution (DE)-based method to jointly optimize the antenna positions and the feasible region size. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed design and demonstrate its ability to achieve a favorable tradeoff between communication performance and covertness.
Keywords
covert communication, detection error probability, feasible region, movable antenna
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of Publication
1-1-2026
E-ISSN
21622345
ISSN
21622337
Volume
15
Publication Title
IEEE Wireless Communications Letters
Publisher
IEEE
School
School of Science
RAS ID
101820
Funding Information
This work was supported in part by Taishan Scholar Project of Shandong under Grant tsqn202306158, in part by NSF of Shandong under Grant 2024HYYQ-054 and Grant ZR2025QC1634, and in part by NSF of China under Grant 62503298.
Copyright
subscription content
First Page
4180
Last Page
4184
Recommended Citation
Dai, Y., Zhang, J., Wang, Q., Chorti, A., Sun, J., & Yan, S. (2026). A larger feasible region always better for movable-antenna-aided covert communications? IEEE Wireless Communications Letters, 15, 4180–4184. https://doi.org/10.1109/LWC.2026.3714072