Fundamental performance limit of covert free-space optical communications

With the development of wireless communication, free-space optical (FSO) communication is becom-ing a highly promising technology. In this paper, we consider the covert FSO communication between two legitimate peers in the presence of an external warden. We establish a system model under a nonnegativity constraint, a peak optical intensity constraint, an average optical intensity constraint and a covertness constraint. For the considered system, the optimal input signal is shown to follow a uniform distribution. Based on the optimal input signal and covertness constraint, we obtain an upper bound that should be satisfied by the transmitter's peak optical intensity, which provides a basis for the transmitter to set the transmit optical intensity. We also derive the upper bound of maximum amount of information transmitted covertly, which reveals the fundamental performance limit of covert FSO communication. Finally, we verify the theoretical analysis by numerical simulations.(c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.