MA-enhanced Mixed Near-field and Far-field Covert Communications

In this paper, we propose to employ a modular-based movable extremely large-scale array (XL-array) at Alice for enhancing covert communication performance. Compared with existing work that mostly considered either far-field or near-field covert communications, we consider in this paper a more general and practical mixed-field scenario, where multiple Bobs are located in either the near-field or far-field of Alice, in the presence of multiple near-field Willies. Specifically, we first consider a two-Bob-one-Willie system and show that conventional fixed-position XL-arrays suffer degraded sum-rate performance due to the energy-spread effect in mixed-field systems, which, however, can be greatly improved by subarray movement. On the other hand, for transmission covertness, it is revealed that sufficient angle difference between far-field Bob and Willie as well as adequate range difference between near-field Bob and Willie are necessary for ensuring covertness in fixed-position XL-array systems, while this requirement can be relaxed in movable XL-array systems thanks to flexible channel correlation control between Bobs and Willie. Next, for general system setups, we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the achievable sum-rate under covertness constraint. To solve this non-convex optimization problem, we first decompose it into two subproblems, corresponding to an inner problem for beamforming optimization given positions of subarrays and an outer problem for subarray movement optimization. Although these two subproblems are still non-convex, we obtain their high-quality solutions by using the successive convex approximation technique and devising a customized differential evolution algorithm, respectively. Last, numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed movable XL-array in balancing sum-rate and covert communication requirements.