Wireless covert communications with distributed cooperative jamming over fading channels

This paper studies covert communications between a pair of legitimate transmitter-receiver against a watchful warden over fading channels. There coexist multiple friendly helper nodes who are willing to protect the covert communication from being detected by the warden. An uncoordinated jammer selection scheme is proposed where those helpers whose instantaneous channel gains to the legitimate receiver fall below a pre-established selection threshold will be chosen as jammers radiating jamming signals to defeat the warden. Afterwards, we jointly design the optimal selection threshold and transmission rate for maximizing covert throughput under the premise that the detection error of the warden exceeds a certain level. Numerical results demonstrate that the maximal covert throughput improves significantly as the total number of helpers increases.