On Covert Rate in Full-Duplex D2D-Enabled Cellular Networks with Spectrum Sharing and Power Control

This paper investigates the fundamental covert rate performance in a D2D-enabled cellular network consisting of a cellular user Alice, a base station BS, an active warden Willie, and a D2D pair with a transmitter <tex-math notation="LaTeX">Dₜ</tex-math> and a full-duplex receiver <tex-math notation="LaTeX">Dᵣ</tex-math> . To conduct covert communication between Alice and BS, the full-duplex <tex-math notation="LaTeX">Dᵣ</tex-math> transmits jamming signal to confuse the active Willie and also receives signal from <tex-math notation="LaTeX">Dₜ</tex-math> simultaneously. With spectrum sharing, <tex-math notation="LaTeX">Dₜ</tex-math> can operate over either an underlay mode reusing cellular spectrum or an overlay mode using dedicated spectrum. With power control, <tex-math notation="LaTeX">Dᵣ</tex-math> can send jamming signal to confuse Willie's detection of the transmission from Alice. We first provide theoretical results for the outage probabilities of the cellular and D2D transmissions, the average minimum detection error probability at Willie, and the achievable covert rate from Alice to BS. We then explore the power control for covert rate maximization (CRM) under the underlay mode as well as the joint designs of power control and spectrum partition for CRM under the overlay mode. We further consider a mode selection that flexibly switches between these two modes with a probability, and also investigate the covert rate modeling and joint designs of power control, spectrum partition and mode selection probability for CRM. Finally, numerical results are presented to illustrate the covert rate performances of the network under the underlay mode, overlay mode and mode selection.