Simultaneously Transmitting and Reflecting RIS (STAR-RIS) Assisted Multi-Antenna Covert Communication: Analysis and Optimization

This paper investigates the multi-antenna covert communications assisted by a simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS). In particular, to shelter the existence of covert communications between a multi-antenna transmitter and a single-antenna receiver f...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIEEE transactions on wireless communications Vol. 23; no. 6; pp. 6438 - 6452
Main Authors Xiao, Han, Hu, Xiaoyan, Mu, Pengcheng, Wang, Wenjie, Zheng, Tong-Xing, Wong, Kai-Kit, Yang, Kun
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York IEEE 01.06.2024
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects
Algorithms
Antennas
Beamforming
Convexity
Covert communication
Error detection
full-duplex
Interference cancellation
Iterative algorithms
Jamming
multi-antenna
Optimization
Receivers
Receivers & amplifiers
Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces
Simulation
STAR-RIS
Symmetric matrices
Transmission
Wireless communication
Wireless communications
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Summary:This paper investigates the multi-antenna covert communications assisted by a simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS). In particular, to shelter the existence of covert communications between a multi-antenna transmitter and a single-antenna receiver from a warden, a friendly full-duplex receiver with two antennas is leveraged to make contributions where one antenna is responsible for receiving the transmitted signals and the other one transmits the jamming signals with a varying power to confuse the warden. Considering the worst case, the closed-form expression of the minimum detection error probability (DEP) at the warden is derived and utilized in a covert constraint to guarantee the system performance. Then, we formulate an optimization problem maximizing the covert rate of the system under the covertness constraint and quality of service (QoS) constraint with communication outage analysis. To jointly design the active and passive beamforming of the transmitter and STAR-RIS, an iterative algorithm based on semi-definite relaxation (SDR) method and Dinkelbach's algorithm is proposed to effectively solve the non-convex optimization problem. Simulation results show that the proposed STAR-RIS-assisted scheme highly outperforms the case with conventional RIS, which validates the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm as well as the superiority of STAR-RIS in guaranteeing the covertness of wireless communications.
ISSN:1536-1276
1558-2248
DOI:10.1109/TWC.2023.3331706