Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS)-Aided Covert Communication With Warden’s Statistical CSI

Abstract

This work considers covert communications with the aid of an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS). We jointly design the transmit power and IRS's reflection phase shifts and amplitudes to enhance covert communication performance. To this end, we first derive the total detection error rate at a warden. We then determine the IRS's optimal phase shifts and develop an effective one-dimensional search method to identify the IRS's optimal amplitudes. We show that the IRS can significantly improve the achievable covertness. In addition, optimizing the IRS's amplitudes on top of its phase shifts significantly outperforms fixing them as unit in covert communications.