Performance Analysis for User Scheduling in Covert Cognitive Radio Networks

Covert communication provides high-level security for protecting users’ privacy information. In this paper, we analyze the joint impact of an external jammer and channel uncertainty on covert communication in multi-user cognitive radio networks. Meanwhile, to fairly schedule the covert communication over multi-user cognitive radio networks, we propose a fairness secondary user (SU) scheduling scheme, which enables each SU to have the same probability for sending information covertly with the aid of an external jammer. Then, the closed-form expression for the covert rate of the scheduled SU can be obtained. Our results show that the minimal detection error probability and covert rate of the scheduled SU can be significantly improved by exploiting the channel uncertainty and random variation of interference power. Moreover, the impact of interference power on the probability of detection error and the covert rate is noticeable when channel uncertainty is large.