Achieving Positive Covert Capacity over MIMO AWGN Channels

Abstract

We consider covert communication, i.e., hiding the presence of communication from an adversary for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. We characterize the maximum covert coding rate under a variety of settings, including different regimes where either the number of transmit antennas or the blocklength is scaled up. We show that a non-zero covert capacity can be achieved in the massive MIMO regime in which the number of transmit antennas scales up but under specific conditions. Under such conditions, we show that the covert capacity of MIMO AWGN channels converges the capacity of MIMO AWGN channels. Furthermore, we derive the order-optimal scaling of the number of covert bits in the regime where the covert capacity is zero. We provide an insightful comparative analysis of different cases in which secrecy and energy-undetectability constraints are imposed separately or jointly.

Covert communication, low probability of detection communication, MIMO AWGN, square-root law, secrecy capacity, compound channels, unit-rank MIMO

References in corpus (8)

• Limits of Reliable Communication with Low Probability of Detection on AWGN Channels
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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Covert MIMO Communications under Variational Distance Constraint
• A New Noncoherent Gaussian Signaling Scheme for Low Probability of Detection Communications
• Bounds on Covert Capacity with Sub-Exponential Random Slot Selection