Covert Communication in Cooperative NOMA Networks

Abstract

The main motivation behind the covert communication is hiding the very existence of a communication between two users. In this work, we study the covert communication performance in non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) networks with amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying. In the considered system model, the relay aims at detecting the covert transmission, while the transmitter hides the covert transmission by mixing the covert message with an open message for another user. We study the covert communication performance under different qualityof-service (QoS) and detection error probability requirements. The presented numerical results indicate the effect of covertness requirement to the considered system performance.