Mean-Field Artificial Noise Assistance and Uplink Power Control in Covert IoT Systems

Abstract

In this paper, we study a covert Internet of Things (IoT) system. Compared with conventional IoT systems that apply cryptography and information-theoretic secrecy approaches to secure the transmission, our considered IoT system adopts the covertness technique and intends to hide the legitimate transmission from the observant adversaries. In the IoT system, the IoT devices randomly transmit the collected data to their associated IoT gateways (GWs). In the meantime, the adversaries attempt to detect the existence of legitimate transmission based on their received signal power and launch hostile attacks accordingly. To avoid being detected by the adversaries, the IoT system applies uplink power control to achieve covert legitimate transmission. Moreover, to distort the observation of the adversaries so as to mislead their decisions, we propose an artificial noise (AN)-assisted covert communication design, where the AN is transmitted by in-band full-duplex (IBFD) IoT GWs as a jamming operation. We formulate a Stackelberg game to study the interaction between the adversaries and the legitimate entities including the IoT GWs and IoT devices, where the legitimate entities, as the leaders, decide on the powers of legitimate and AN transmissions at the upper level and the adversaries, as the followers, aim to minimize their detection errors at the lower level. Thereafter, considering the large scale of IoT system, we further cast the Stackelberg game into a mean-field Stackelberg game and incorporate the stochastic geometry and statistical channel model to capture the location heterogeneity and channel dynamics among and of the system entities, respectively. In the performance evaluation, we verify the practicability of the mean-field Stackelberg game. Moreover, we demonstrate the effectiveness of AN in improving the transmission covertness.