Analysis of Impact of Hardware Impairments on Cover Communication Using a Friendly Jammer

Keshavarzi, Mohammadreza; Forouzesh, Moslem; Kuhestani, کوهستانی

Analysis of Impact of Hardware Impairments on Cover Communication Using a Friendly Jammer

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Mohammadreza Keshavarzi ¹

Moslem forouzesh ²

کوهستانی Kuhestani ³

¹ Assistant Professor, Communication and Information Technology Research Institute, Tehran, Iran

² Assistant Professor, Amol University of New Technologies, Amol, Iran

³ Assistant Professor, Qom University of Technology, Qom, Iran

Abstract

The presence of hardware impairments in communication systems is one of the challenges that can impact system performance. In many presented articles, researchers do not consider this issue and ignore their effects, while in cases such as communication security, their role can be more prominent, and perhaps they can be used as a feature to enhance communication security. In this paper, a covert communication protocol for a network including a source, a destination, and a malicious node (observer) is presented. In order to deceive the observer, a friendly jammer is recruited in the network to continuously send jamming. For such a communication network, an optimization problem is designed with the aim of maximizing the covert rate. Since this problem is a non-convex optimization problem, Epigraph and DC methods are used to solve it, and an iterative algorithm is proposed. Simulation results show that the hardware impairments of the transmitter and receiver have the most significant impact on the covert rate, and the hardware impairments of the jammer also have the least impact on the covert rate, so that when the impairment value of the jammer, observer, receiver and transmitter are considered to be 0.5, the covert rate relatives to the case where there is no impairment in any of the nodes decreases by 4.2%, 8%, 62.2% and 62.8%, respectively. Therefore, designing a transmitter and receiver with the least hardware impairment compared to other nodes is essential and plays a significant role in improving covert communication performance.

Keywords

Covert communication

Hardware impairments

Friendly jammer

20.1001.1.23224347.1404.13.3.4.3

Subjects

Information security, encryption, encryption, protocols and standards

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