Multi-User Covert Communications via Intelligent Spectrum Control

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Abstract
This letter investigates multi-user covert communications. Specifically, we propose an intelligent spectrum control (ISC) scheme that employs spectrum sensing-assisted dynamic control to generate time-frequency resource occupation matrices for multiple legitimate users. Guided by these matrices, the users can occupy different frequency slots irregularly for covert data transmission. By performing spectrum sensing in advance, the proposed scheme can also proactively avoid external interference and co-channel collisions among users. In addition, we consider an eavesdropper with wideband detection capability and derive the closed-form expressions for the minimum detection error probability (DEP) of the eavesdropper and the reliable transmission probability (RTP) of the legitimate users. We then optimize the transmit power to maximize the covert rate (CR), and further characterize the maximum number of legitimate users that can access the network covertly and concurrently. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed ISC scheme in terms of covertness, reliability, and user capacity.
Funding Information
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (62425103)
  • XPLORER PRIZE
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (62121001)

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