Covert Communication in Fading Channels under Channel Uncertainty

A covert communication system under block fading channels is considered where users experience uncertainty about their channel knowledge. The transmitter seeks to hide the covert communication to a private user by exploiting a legitimate public communication link while the warden tries to detect this covert communication by using a radiometer. We derive the exact expression for the radiometers optimal threshold which determines the performance limit of the wardens detector. Furthermore for given transmission outage constraints the achievable rates for legitimate and covert users are analyzed while maintaining a specific level of covertness. Our numerical results illustrate how the achievable performance is affected by the channel uncertainty and required level of covertness.Comment: to appear in IEEE VTC2017-Sprin

Performance Analysis of Arbitrarily-Shaped Underlay Cognitive Networks: Effects of Secondary User Activity Protocols

This paper analyzes the performance of the primary and secondary users (SUs) in an arbitrarily-shaped underlay cognitive network. In order to meet the interference threshold requirement for a primary receiver (PU-Rx) at an arbitrary location, we consider different SU activity protocols which limit the number of active SUs. We propose a framework, based on the moment generating function (MGF) of the interference due to a random SU, to analytically compute the outage probability in the primary network, as well as the average number of active SUs in the secondary network. We also propose a cooperation-based SU activity protocol in the underlay cognitive network which includes the existing threshold-based protocol as a special case. We study the average number of active SUs for the different SU activity protocols, subject to a given outage probability constraint at the PU and we employ it as an analytical approach to compare the effect of different SU activity protocols on the performance of the primary and secondary networks.Comment: submitted to possible IEEE Transactions publicatio