Covert Wireless Communication Against Jamming-Assisted Proactive Detection

In this letter, we consider the covert wireless communication (CWC) against a jamming-assisted proactive detector in two scenarios corresponding to whether Alice utilizes the jamming to hide the communication signals. Specifically, for the both scenarios, we first obtain Alice’s communication strategy by exploiting the statistic channel state information (CSI) of the detecting link. Then, we propose the covertness outage probability (COP) as a new covert communication measure proposed in this letter and derive its closed-form expression which indicates that the lower tolerance value or the longer channel uses are likely to cause communication outage. Numerical results indicate that, against a jamming-assisted proactive detector, hiding the communication signals in the noise is more favorable than exploiting the detector’s jamming for achieving covertness, since the latter raises the transmit power at Alice and thus leads to larger COP.