Joint Beamforming Design for Integrated Sensing and Covert Wireless Communication

This work investigates covert wireless communication in an Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) system. To formulate an efficient sensing solution, we derive an analytical expression for the average Cramér-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) and analyze the detection performance at the warden Willie, deriving a lower bound on his minimum detection error probability. Based on these results, we formulate an optimization strategy aimed at minimizing the average CRLB under communication rate and covertness constraints. To address this problem, a semidefinite relaxation (SDR) method is developed for the joint design of the sensing and covert beamformers. Furthermore, a low-complexity scheme is proposed to decouple the sensing and communication beamformers for reducing the computational complexity. Simulation results demonstrate that both proposed algorithms effectively balance target sensing performance and covert communication performance in the ISAC system.