Achieving Covert Wireless Communication With a Multi-Antenna Relay

We investigate covert wireless communication in a multi-antenna relay network, where the relay transmits its own covert message to the destination when assisting the source’s information delivery, and the source acts as a warden to detect this covert transmission. Based on whether the channel state information of the relay-destination link is available at the source or not, we propose two relay beamforming schemes, namely random beamforming and maximum-ratio transmission (MRT) beamforming schemes, to guarantee the reception reliability at the destination while deliberately introducing uncertainty to the source to degrade its detection. Under the worst-case covert communication scenario where the source is capable of optimizing its detection threshold, analytical expressions for the minimum detection error probability achieved by each of the proposed schemes are derived to evaluate the detection limits of the source. By utilizing the above analytical results as the covertness constraint, an optimization problem of transmit power allocation for each scheme is formulated and solved to maximize the covert rate. The impact of imperfect channel state information on the covert communication performance is also examined. Simulation results are performed to confirm the accuracy of the derived analytical results and quantify the communication covertness enhancement of the proposed schemes. Our results also show that the MRT beamforming scheme offers a higher covert rate than that of the random beamforming scheme, especially when the covertness constraint becomes loose and/or the number of antennas at the relay increases.