Covert Transmission in Power Line Communication Networks

This paper investigates the issue of covertness in a power line communication (PLC) network with the aid of a full-duplex receiver (Bob). Specifically, Bob generates artificial noise (AN) with varying power levels, which causes uncertainty to a potential eavesdropper (Willie), thus assisting the high-security transmission of privacy information for a power user (Alice). Subsequently, the approximate closed-form expressions of Willie’s average minimum detection error probability (MDEP) and Alice’s optimal covert transmission power have been derived by exploiting Gauss-Chebyshev quadrature. Moreover, Bob’s covert performance, including covert rate (CR) and covert transmission outage probability (CTOP) have been analyzed. These results indicate that the joint impact of distance, impulse noise and channel correlation is remarkable for covert performance.