2019/06/16 by Sadaf Salehkalaibar, Salehkalaibar, Sadaf, Mohammad Hossein Yassaee +3 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Engineering · #Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Theory (cs.IT) #Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting #Wireless Communication Security Techniques
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1906.06675
openalex publication_date 2019/06/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In this paper, we consider fundamental communication limits over a compound channel. Covert communication in the information-theoretic context has been primarily concerned with fundamental limits when the transmitter wishes to communicate to legitimate receiver(s) while ensuring that the communication is not detected by an adversary. This paper, however, considers an alternative, and no less important, setting in which the object to be masked is the state of the compound channel. Such a communication model has applications in the prevention of malicious parties seeking to jam the communication signal when, for example, the signal-to-noise ratio of a wireless channel is found to be low. Our main contribution is the establishment of bounds on the throughput-key region when the covertness constraint is defined in terms of the total variation distance. In addition, for the scenario in which the key length is infinite, we provide a sufficient condition for when the bounds coincide for the scaling of the throughput, which follows the square-root law. Numerical examples, including that of a Gaussian channel, are provided to illustrate our results.