Low earth orbit satellite covert communication technology towards Massive MIMO integrated sensing and communication

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite systems offer advantages such as wide coverage and massive connectivity, yet they also face security risks including eavesdropping and interference. This paper investigates a covert communication technique for LEO satellites based on Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) with Massive Multiple Input Multiple Output (Massive MIMO), constructs a system model for Massive MIMO LEO satellite ISAC system, and derives the covertness constraints for the system. Building upon this foundation, two schemes are proposed tailored to scenarios where Eve's Channel State Information (CSI) is either imperfectly known or completely unknown. The radar-based scheme formulates a joint optimization problem aiming to maximize the sum covert communication rate across multiple users Bob, subject to constraints on minimum radar sensing performance, covertness requirements, and upper limits on transmit power for both the satellite and radar. To address this non-convex optimization problem, this paper designs an alternating optimization framework combined with the Minorization-Maximization (MM) algorithm for iterative solution. Simulation results demonstrate that, when the radar transmit power is 80 W, the proposed radar-based scheme achieves approximately an 80% improvement in sum covert communication rate compared to a baseline scheme. Compared with conventional LEO covert communication systems without ISAC capabilities, the radar-based scheme leverages radar signals to generate beneficial interference against Eves, thereby simultaneously enhancing both the covert rate and communication covertness. Additionally, under the premise that radar sensing performance meets its minimum requirement, the Artificial Noise (AN) scheme utilizes surplus transmit power to generate AN that disrupts potential Eves, further improving both the covert rate and communication covertness.