Association Problem Between Multiple Jammers and Multiple Wardens in Covert Communication Networks With <scp>TCIPC</scp>

ABSTRACT Network survivability refers to the capability of the networks to maintain a guaranteed quality of service (QoS) in the presence of malicious attacks and node failures. The covert wireless communication (CWC) technique can improve the survivability of wireless Internet of Things (IoT) networks by hiding the desired signals in background noises. In this paper, the CWC scheme for the multiple jammers and multiple wardens networks is investigated, where the truncated channel inversion power control (TCIPC) is applied. The outage probability is utilized to evaluate the communication effectiveness, and the detection error probability (DEP) is used to evaluate the covertness. Then, the association problem between the multiple jammers and the multiple wardens is studied. The optimal association problem is formulated as a min‐max integer programming problem to minimize the outage probability between Alice and Bob, subject to the DEP constraints, which are hard to solve. It is demonstrated that the genetic algorithm is a valid method to solve the proposed min‐max integer programming problem, and the performances are analyzed.