Covert Communications for STAR-RIS-Assisted Industrial Networks With a Full Duplex Receiver and RSMA

In this article, we investigate covert communication in simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS)-assisted networks with rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA). Specifically, a legitimate transmitter employs RSMA to send messages over the STAR-RIS to a pair of legitimate users located on both sides of the STAR-RIS, where the user on the transmitting surface is equipped with a full-duplex (FD) receiver with two antennas. In particular, one of the receiver’s antennas is used to receive signals and the other is used to transmit jamming signals to confuse the warden’s detection. In order to evaluate the covert performance of the considered system, we derive closed-form expressions for the detection error probability (DEP), the outage probability, and the covert rate. Then, the effects of the maximum signal interference power of the FD, the power distribution coefficient, and the reflection coefficient of the STAR-RIS elements on the covert performance are presented. The numerical results indicate that increasing the maximum signal interference power of the FD enhances the value of DEP, but reduces its outage performance. Additionally, it is observed that the impact of the reflection coefficient of the STAR-RIS elements on the covert performance is related to the transmit power, and the DEP is a monotonically increasing function of the reflection coefficient when the transmit power is sufficiently high.