Achieving Covert Communication in Overlay Cognitive Radio Networks

In this paper, we investigate the covert communications in an overlay cognitive radio (CR) network, where multiple secondary transmitters (STs) opportunistically send confidential information to a secondary receiver (SR). In contrast to current studies with ensuring security of information transmitted, we are motivated to protect communication behavior in CR network, which is considered as a higher-level security. To address covert rate and fairness performance, three joint user-jammer scheduling schemes are proposed, namely, rate-oriented secondary user scheduling (R-SUS), link-oriented secondary user scheduling (L-SUS), and fairness oriented secondary user scheduling (F-SUS). Numerical results show that the minimal detection error probability at eavesdropper (Eve) can be effectively impacted by creating channel uncertainty with the jamming signal. Further, it can be seen that under the same covert constraint, the R-SUS scheme achieves the best covert rate performance, full diversity can be obtained by the L-SUS scheme, while the F-SUS scheme exploits an advantage of better fairness.