On Covert Communication Performance With Outdated CSI in Wireless Greedy Relay Systems

Communication performance relies largely on the availability of channel state information (CSI). This paper investigates the impact of outdated CSI on the achievable covert communication performance in a two-hop wireless relay system under two typical covert transmission schemes of rate-control transmission (RCT) and power-control transmission (PCT). We first apply the typical channel feedback delay model to determine the statistical distribution of outdated CSI, based on which we then develop theoretical models to depict the inherent relationship between outdated CSI and the fundamental covert performance metrics in terms of detection error probability (DEP) and covert rate (CR). With the help of these models, we further explore the optimization of DEP subject to the CR constraint as well as the optimization of CR subject to the DEP constraint to reveal the max-min DEP performance and the maximal CR performance with the outdated CSI. Finally, extensive numerical results are provided to illustrate the impact of outdated CSI on the covert communication performance.