Near-field beamforming for covert wireless communications with finite blocklength

Author Identifier (ORCID)

Shihao Yan: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4586-1926

Abstract

In this work, we focus on developing near-field beamforming schemes for covert wireless communications to maximize the communication quality while ensuring communication covertness, where three different antenna architectures are considered. Specifically, we first analyze the monotonicities of the throughput and the minimum detection error probability with respect to the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at a legitimate receiver and a warden. Then, the formulated optimization problem is transformed into a semi-definite programming (SDP) problem via vectorizing the matrix. Lastly, a maximum signal-to-leakage ratio (MSLR) scheme with a low complexity is proposed. Our results indicate that the proposed near-field beamforming schemes facilitate covert communication in both the distance and angle dimensions. The two hybrid antenna architectures lead to a slight performance loss, but significantly reduce the circuit budget. Meanwhile, the low-complexity algorithm greatly reduces the algorithm complexity, although it exhibits a noticeable disadvantage in its covert transmission performance. Furthermore, our results indicate that the designed near-field beamforming strategies are more beneficial in meeting the covertness constraints, highlighting a feasibility of covert communications in the near-field region.

Document Type

Journal Article

Date of Publication

1-1-2025

Publication Title

IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications

Publisher

IEEE

School

School of Science

Comments

Shen, T., Yan, S., Zhou, X., Xia, G., & Shu, F. (2025). Near-field beamforming for covert wireless communications with finite blocklength. IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1109/TWC.2025.3598344

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Link to publisher version (DOI)

10.1109/TWC.2025.3598344