Covert Communication in Cognitive Radio Networks with Poisson Distributed Jammers

This work proposes a covert communication scheme in a cognitive radio network where a secondary transmitter (ST) transmits confidential information to a secondary receiver under the cover of jammers with homogeneous Poisson point process. Specifically, we first analyze the detection performance of the primary transmitter (PT) and Willie under collaboration and non-collaboration modes. We then derive the covert transmission outage probability under ST’s correct and incorrect decisions for whether PT transmits or not and obtain the expression for the effective covert rate (ECR). In order to maximize the ECR, we derive the optimal value of the time allocation ratio, based on which, we also derive the optimal value of ST’s transmit power subject to the covertness constraint and some power constraints. Our examination shows the non-collaboration mode outperforms the collaboration mode in terms of achieving a higher ECR, because the uncertainty of the PTs transmission in the former one will cause confusion at Willie and lead to an increased detection error rate. In addition, the proposed scheme effectively increases the ECR when compared with the scheme without the jammer.