A Covert Surveillance Strategy for a Solar-Powered UAV over Suspicious Mobile Target

Abstract

Benefiting from the characteristics such as low-cost, excellent mobility and flexibility, rapid deployment, the aerial drones have been widely applied to wireless communication systems in both military and civilian domains. In particular,for the objects on the ground, UAVs could provide a high probability of line-of-sight (LoS) that enhances the capacity of the system. In this paper, we consider the application of covert surveillance for a solar-powered UAV on a suspicious mobile target on the ground while disguising its intention. A Q-learning based covert surveillance method is formulated to maximize the disguising metric and minimize the energy consumption while harvesting the solar energy while operation. Computer simulations demonstrate the performance of the proposed method, which outperforms the baseline method in both eavesdropping and disguising perspectives.