Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could be wrong, but I don't know if that is true here. First, if the receiver is aware exactly what parts to ignore, and the transmission itself is not interfered with or altered, then it's not really noise as far as the channel is concerned. Second, the assumption here is that spurious packets would be sent when data is not being transmitted, so this principle probably wouldn't hold anyway because the "noise" is i…
1. The receiver here is the person determining whether or not they are being spied on. Not the user of the drone. 2. In order to make the real spikes fit into your random pattern you'd need to be able to predict when they will happen.
Given that you have a channel between A and B and an eavesdropper C:
Transmission between A and B can be done by any of several obfuscatory protocols, where (for example) a certain flag sent by A tells B to ignore some component of the transmission, to do no error correction on that part, etc. That flag is sent when updates are sparse, and filler (which is to be ignored) is added by B. Without determining how to identify between filler and data, C sees no variations in traffic volume.
Overcoming real-time spikes is easy with this protocol. Just keep a buffer of a few seconds before you begin transmitting.
This approach is a common answer to any sort of traffic analysis. There's actually a Tor alternative that operates on this principle of constant traffic between nodes (traffic analysis is an effective attack versus Tor), but the name escapes me at the moment.