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IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Information Theory

Covert Communication Over the Poisson Channel

Ligong Wang

Published Jan 21, 2021• 23 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We consider the problem of communication over a continuous-time Poisson channel subject to a covertness constraint: The relative entropy between the output distributions when a message is transmitted and when no input is provided must be small. In the absence of both bandwidth and peak-power constraints, we show the covert communication capacity of this channel, in nats per second, to be infinity. When a peak-power constraint is imposed on the input, the covert communication capacity becomes zero, and the “square-root scaling law” applies. When a bandwidth constraint but no peak-power constraint is imposed, the covert communication capacity is again shown to be zero, but we have not determined whether the square-root law holds or not.

DOI
10.1109/jsait.2021.3053126

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We consider the problem of communication over a continuous-time Poisson channel subject to a covertness constraint: The relative entropy between the output distributions when a message is transmitted and when no input is provided must be small. In the absence of both bandwidth and peak-power constraints, we show the covert communication capacity of this channel, in nats per second, to be infinity. When a peak-power constraint is imposed on the input, the covert communication capacity becomes zero, and the “square-root scaling law” applies. When a bandwidth constraint but no peak-power constraint is imposed, the covert communication capacity is again shown to be zero, but we have not determined whether the square-root law holds or not.
We consider a problem of communication over a continuous-time additive Gaussian noise channel. A covertness constraint is imposed on the communication protocol, which says that the channel output must statistically resemble pure noise. When there is no bandwidth constraint on the input, we argue that the covert communication capacity of this channel is positive, in contrast to the band-limited case where covertness requires that the amount of transmission grow at most like the square root of total communication time. This claim is formally proven in the case where the Gaussian noise is white with respect to the bandwidth used by the transmitter.
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This paper considers the problem of communication over a discrete memoryless channel subject to the constraint that the probability that an adversary who observes the channel outputs can detect the communication is low. Specifically, the relative entropy between the output distributions when a codeword is transmitted and when no input is provided to the channel must be sufficiently small. For a channel whose output distribution induced by the zero input symbol is not a mixture of the output distributions induced by other input symbols, it is shown that the maximum number of bits that can be transmitted under this criterion scales like the square root of the blocklength. Exact expressions for the scaling constant are also derived.
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