Covert Communication in Relaying Sensor Systems

Abstract

Sensor systems are paramount importance for data transmission in the Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, lots of unauthorized attacking from the adversary makes such systems to face security challenges due to the broadcast and openness natures of wireless channels. This paper studies the performance of covert communication in a relaying sensor system. We first propose random relay selection scheme and based on this scheme, we derive the expressions of covert performances in terms of transmission outage probability, detection error probability and covert capacity. We further optimize the covert transmit power of source to maximize the covert capacity with the covert requirement. Finally, numerical results are provided to illustrate our theoretical achievements and the impact of some parameters on the performances of such system.