Covert MIMO Ambient Backscatter Communication

Abstract

This paper studies covert MIMO ambient backscatter communication (AmBC). In contrast to the prior covert AmBC works, we equip all devices with multiple antennas, where a backscatter tag works as a beamformer to hide both his transmission behavior and location from a warden. Technically, we derive two key metrics, namely the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KL divergence) measuring the transmission covertness and the covert rate measuring the transmission efficiency. We reveal that they both increase monotonically w.r.t the number of the tag's antenna. This tradeoff makes the optimum parameter configuration non-trivial. To this end, we optimize the beamformer of the tag to maximize the covert rate subject to the covertness constraint under perfect knowledge of the warden's channel state information (WCSI). We use the matrix permutation and semi-definite relaxation (SDR) method to make the formulated non-convex problem convex, and obtain the solution with the barrier method. We also study the impact of imperfect WCSI. To address the uncertain estimate error, we use the S-Procedure to reformulate the constraints linearly and the primal-dual interior-point method for a near-optimal solution. We conduct extensive numerical experiments and confirm that our work outperforms the state-of-the-art ones.