On Covert Communication with Interference Uncertainty

Abstract

Covert communication can prevent the opponent from knowing that a wireless communication has occurred. If only the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels and ambient noise are taken into consideration, a square root law was obtained and the result shows that the privacy rate approaches zero asymptotically. In this paper, we consider the covert communication in large-scale wireless networks, where the transmitters form a stationary Poisson point process, and Alice wishes to communicate covertly to Bob without being detected by warden Dave. In this scenario, Bob and Dave not only experience the ambient noise, but also the aggregate interference simultaneously. Although the interference sources are not in collusion with Alice, and Bob's noise increases as well, our results show that, the measurement uncertainty of Dave will increase along with the increase of interference, and interference can indeed improve the performance of covert communication.