Limits of Reliable Communication with Low Probability of Detection on AWGN Channels

By Boulat A. Bash, Dennis L. Goeckel, Don Towsley. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 2012

991 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a square root limit on the amount of information transmitted reliably and with low probability of detection (LPD) over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. Specifically, if the transmitter has AWGN channels to an intended receiver and a warden, both with non-zero noise power, we prove that o(√n) bits can be sent from the transmitter to the receiver in n channel uses while lower-bounding α + β ≥ 1-ε for any ε > 0, where α and β respectively denote the warden's probabilities of a false alarm when the sender is not transmitting and a missed detection when the sender is transmitting. Moreover, in most practical scenarios, a lower bound on the noise power on the channel between the transmitter and the warden is known and O(√n) bits can be sent in n LPD channel uses. Conversely, attempting to transmit more than O(√n) bits either results in detection by the warden with probability one or a non-zero probability of decoding error at the receiver as n→∞.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f7db4823fc4a6b590fafe681c91eec643fe5f837

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Citations in the corpus

On Covert Communication With Noise Uncertainty (2016, background): “Considering additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels, a square root law was found in [2].”
Low Probability of Detection Communication: Opportunities and Challenges (2019, methodology): “Research on LPD communication focuses on the fundamental limits of hiding wireless transmissions, in terms of the amount of information that can be conveyed covertly from a transmitter Alice to a legitimate receiver Bob subject to a speciﬁc probability of being detected by a warden Willie [1], [4].”
Hiding information in noise: fundamental limits of covert wireless communication (2015, methodology): “Furthermore, the recent extension of [6] to digital covert communication that we describe next suggests that the pre-shared secret can be eliminated in some scenarios.”
Covert Communications: A Comprehensive Survey (2023, methodology): “The theoretical square root limit in AWGN channels has been well demonstrated and proved in [22], which broke the ice of covert communication research.”
Covert Communication in the Presence of an Uninformed Jammer (2016, background): “Bob should also be capable of reliably decoding Alice’s message [3].”
Fundamental Limits of Communication With Low Probability of Detection (2015, background): “Note that, for channels that cannot be reduced to one that satis-ﬁes (3), such as the binary erasure channel, nontrivial LPD communication is not possible.”
Covert Communication Over Noisy Channels: A Resolvability Perspective (2015, methodology): “In the remainder of the paper, we use the terminology “covert communication” as a synonym for low-probability of detection [2], [3], [19], deniability [7], [9], and undetectable communication [10], [11], since all terms refer to the same definition.”