Underwater Covert Communications Relying on Bargaining Game Theory

Given the increasing attention paid to the security of underwater communications, covert communication system has been envisaged as a key enabler for empowering the marine information networks to address the challenge of ever-increasing demand of anti-eavesdropping. However, dynamic underwater hydrology environment and ambient noise make it substantially difficult to reduce the decoding error probability as much as possible on the premise of meeting the concealment requirements. In this paper, we first build up underwater covert communication (UCC) system and analyze its secrecy performance at the physical (PHY) layer. Moreover, we propose a dynamic power-threshold based bargaining game model to preserve the receiver’s concealment, while ensuring high receiver-side signal-to-interface-noise ratio (SINR). The simulation results show the detection probability at the equilibrium of our model is optimal, and thus it is capable of both overcoming the dynamic changes and of increasing the system’s stability significantly by analyzing the time discount factor.