Auction-Based Jammer Selection Strategy and Power Control in Vehicular Covert Communication

In the Internet of vehicles, using jammers to assist covert communication can protect the security of vehicular communication in some sensitive or special scenarios. However, the issue of three-party spectrum resource allocation involving multiple coexisting transmitters, receivers, and jammers has rarely been studied. This paper investigates jammer selection and power control in vehicular covert communication. To maximize the utility of spectrum resources, a vehicular covert communication auction model (VCCAM) is established and formulated as a 0-1 integer programming problem. We derive the optimal detection threshold for minimum average detection error probability and corresponding optimal transmit power based on the slow fading statistical channel state information (CSI) of mobile links. We then propose a reverse Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) auction algorithm that ensures incentive compatibility and individual rationality. However, it lacks computational efficiency. To address this, we introduce the reverse second-price sealed-bid algorithm (SPSA), which reduces the VCG auction’s factorial complexity to polynomial complexity, offering a computationally efficient, suboptimal solution. Extensive simulations verify the effectiveness, communication covertness, computational efficiency, incentive compatibility, and individual rationality of the proposed algorithms, showing that our algorithm significantly outperforms other baselines.