Covert Communications With a Full-Duplex Receiver in Non-Coherent Rayleigh Fading

In a majority of research on covert communications, knowledge about channel state information (CSI) of main channel and/or warden channel is assumed to be known or partially known. However, a covert user may not afford to perform channel estimation in practice, and acquiring the warden’s CSI is even impossible. In this paper, we investigate covert communications over non-coherent Rayleigh fading channels, in both i.i.d. fast fading and slow fading cases. We observe that the purpose of covert communication in many scenarios is to hide the existence of the sender, not the receiver. Therefore, we allow the receiver to work in full-duplex mode such that it can emit artificial noise (AN) while receiving signals simultaneously. We analyse the achievable covert rates with fixed and varying AN power and show that in both fast and slow fading cases, it is possible to achieve a positive covert rate. For the slow fading case, we further extend the proposed strategy to a multi-user scenario, in which multiple other users share the same spectral resource and cause interference at the warden. Extensive simulations are performed to verify the correctness of our analysis, which provide new insights on the AN design problem in non-coherent channels.