Joint Probabilistic Shaping and Symbol-Level Precoding for Covert LEO Satellite Downlinks

Overview & Synopsis

The wide footprint of low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite downlinks exposes the mere occurrence of a transmission to any receiver within it. This paper studies covert multiuser LEO downlinks, where a passive warden at an unknown but fixed ground location accumulates observations as the satellite moves. We jointly optimize the precoding and the occurrence probabilities of the multiuser symbol combinations to provide covertness against such wardens. Each phase-shift keying (PSK) symbol vector is decomposed into a relative pattern and a common rotation, so that shaping the pattern probabilities leaves the symbols of every legitimate user uniformly distributed. We develop probabilistically shaped symbol-level precoding and probabilistically shaped block-level precoding. We derive the exact chi-square divergence of the warden's Gaussian-mixture observation over the complete session and, by bounding the leakage over a continuous location uncertainty region, obtain certificates that guarantee covertness throughout that region. The certified covertness level is minimized under robust constructive-interference, power, and entropy constraints through an alternating optimization whose updates are equivalent to convex conic problems, and the optimized probabilities follow a Maxwell--Boltzmann-type law. Numerical results show that shaping substantially reduces the certified covertness level of both precoding structures, particularly under large location uncertainty, low elevation, and scarce power.