Covert Digital Semantic Communication With Movable Antennas: Constellation Shaping, Spatial Optimization, and Semantic Mapping
Abstract
Digital semantic communication (SemCom) is emerging as a bandwidth-efficient paradigm for next-generation wireless networks by delivering the meaning of a source over finite constellations. However, the broadcast nature of wireless channels exposes transmissions to adversarial wardens, while discrete symbols deviate from the Gaussian signaling assumed by conventional covert communication. In this paper, we propose a covert digital SemCom system assisted by movable antennas (MAs), where the constellation, the antenna positions, and the semantic transceiver are jointly designed to conceal the transmission while preserving the semantic fidelity. Specifically, the maximum covert rate against the optimal detector with unknown noise level is derived in closed-form, which reveals that the legitimate signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scales with the moment-matching order of the constellation and the spatial gain provided by the MA array. A Gauss-Laguerre ring constellation is then designed to raise the moment-matching order under the peak power constraints, and a covert symbol mapping with rank-to-ring assignment and scrambling is developed to carry the semantics in the ordering of the latent magnitudes. Guided by the derived semantic distortion bound, the semantic encoder and decoder are trained end-to-end through an invertible flow over the designed constellation and MA array. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme supports a higher achievable covert rate and improves the reconstruction quality by 24% compared to state-of-the-art SemCom schemes.
Related
- Cooperative Multi-Task Semantic Communication for Joint Classification and Regression Tasks
- End-to-End Optical Semantic Communication over a Nonlinear WDM Fiber Link
- Towards Faithful and Efficient Semantic Communication: An Ontological Approach
- Significance-Driven Semantic Communication
- Semantic Communication for Non-Terrestrial Networks: A Survey from Platform Constraints to System Design
BibTeX
@misc{bai2026covert,
title = {{Covert Digital Semantic Communication With Movable Antennas: Constellation Shaping, Spatial Optimization, and Semantic Mapping}},
author = {Yunfan Bai and Yuwen Qian and Hao Jiang and Yiyang Ni and Feng Shu and Jun Li and Shuning Zhang},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.23076},
eprint = {2610.23076},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23076},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Covert Digital Semantic Communication With Movable Antennas: Constellation Shaping, Spatial Optimization, and Semantic Mapping
AU - Yunfan Bai
AU - Yuwen Qian
AU - Hao Jiang
AU - Yiyang Ni
AU - Feng Shu
AU - Jun Li
AU - Shuning Zhang
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/16
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.23076
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23076
AB - Digital semantic communication (SemCom) is emerging as a bandwidth-efficient paradigm for next-generation wireless networks by delivering the meaning of a source over finite constellations. However, the broadcast nature of wireless channels exposes transmissions to adversarial wardens, while discrete symbols deviate from the Gaussian signaling assumed by conventional covert communication. In this paper, we propose a covert digital SemCom system assisted by movable antennas (MAs), where the constellation, the antenna positions, and the semantic transceiver are jointly designed to conceal the transmission while preserving the semantic fidelity. Specifically, the maximum covert rate against the optimal detector with unknown noise level is derived in closed-form, which reveals that the legitimate signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scales with the moment-matching order of the constellation and the spatial gain provided by the MA array. A Gauss-Laguerre ring constellation is then designed to raise the moment-matching order under the peak power constraints, and a covert symbol mapping with rank-to-ring assignment and scrambling is developed to carry the semantics in the ordering of the latent magnitudes. Guided by the derived semantic distortion bound, the semantic encoder and decoder are trained end-to-end through an invertible flow over the designed constellation and MA array. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme supports a higher achievable covert rate and improves the reconstruction quality by 24% compared to state-of-the-art SemCom schemes.
ER -