On the Second Order Asymptotics of Covert Communications over AWGN Channels
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
1-1-2024
Abstract
This work tackles the asymptotics of the maximal throughput of covert communications over AWGN channels when the covert metric is Kullback-Leibler divergence (KL divergence). It is shown that the first and second order asymptotics of the maximal throughput are nδ e and (2) 12(n δ)14( e)34 ċ Q-1(epsilon), respectively by n channel uses, where δ and epsilon are constraints imposed on covertness and channel decoding error probabilities, respectively. The technique we use in the achievability is quasi- varepsilon -neighborhood notion from information geometry. For finite blocklength n, the generating distributions are chosen to be a family of truncated Gaussian distributions with decreasing variances. The law of decreasing is carefully designed so that it maximizes the throughput at the main channel in the asymptotic sense under the condition that the output distributions satisfy the covert constraint. For the converse, the optimality of Gaussian distribution for minimizing KL divergence under second order moment constraint is extended from dimension 1 to dimension n, which further leads to the direct converse bound in terms of covert metric.
Publication Source (Journal or Book title)
IEEE International Conference on Communications
First Page
1479
Last Page
1484
Recommended Citation
Xinchun, Y., Wei, S., Huang, S., & Zhang, X. (2024). On the Second Order Asymptotics of Covert Communications over AWGN Channels. IEEE International Conference on Communications, 1479-1484. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICC51166.2024.10623117