A Cooperative Deception Strategy for Covert Communication in Presence of a Multi-antenna Adversary

TL;DR

This paper proposes a cooperative deception strategy using a jammer to enhance covert communication against a multi-antenna adversary, optimizing power allocation and demonstrating improved covert rates and robustness.

Contribution

It introduces a novel cooperative deception approach with optimal power allocation, including jammer power control when Alice is silent, and applies advanced optimization techniques for different CSI scenarios.

Findings

Covert rate increases with the number of Willie’s antennas.

The proposed strategy outperforms benchmarks in robustness against imperfect CSI.

Optimal power allocation enhances covert communication effectiveness.

Abstract

Covert transmission is investigated for a cooperative deception strategy, where a cooperative jammer (Jammer) tries to attract a multi-antenna adversary (Willie) and degrade the adversary's reception ability for the signal from a transmitter (Alice). For this strategy, we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the covert rate when three different types of channel state information (CSI) are available. The total power is optimally allocated between Alice and Jammer subject to Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence constraint. Different from the existing literature, in our proposed strategy, we also determine the optimal transmission power at the jammer when Alice is silent, while existing works always assume that the jammer's power is fixed. Specifically, we apply the S-procedure to convert infinite constraints into linear-matrix-inequalities (LMI) constraints. When statistical CSI at Willie is available, we convert double integration to single integration using asymptotic approximation and substitution method. In addition, the transmission strategy without jammer deception is studied as a benchmark. Finally, our simulation results show that for the proposed strategy, the covert rate is increased with the number of antennas at Willie. Moreover, compared to the benchmark, our proposed strategy is more robust in face of imperfect CSI.