Secure and Covert MIMO Short Packet Communications with Location-Uncertain Malicious Nodes

TIAN Bo; YANG Weiwei; YANG Xiaoqin; BAI Mengmeng

doi:10.11999/JEIT260059

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TIAN Bo, YANG Weiwei, YANG Xiaoqin, BAI Mengmeng. Secure and Covert MIMO Short Packet Communications with Location-Uncertain Malicious Nodes[J]. Journal of Electronics & Information Technology. doi: 10.11999/JEIT260059

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TIAN Bo, YANG Weiwei, YANG Xiaoqin, BAI Mengmeng. Secure and Covert MIMO Short Packet Communications with Location-Uncertain Malicious Nodes[J]. Journal of Electronics & Information Technology. doi: 10.11999/JEIT260059

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Secure and Covert MIMO Short Packet Communications with Location-Uncertain Malicious Nodes

doi: 10.11999/JEIT260059 cstr: 32379.14.JEIT260059

College of Communication Engineering, Army Engineering University of PLA, Nanjing 210007, China

Funds: The National Natural Science Foundation of China (62427802, 62301594, 62171461 and 62071486)

Received Date: 2026-01-16
Accepted Date: 2026-05-12
Rev Recd Date: 2026-05-12

Available Online: 2026-05-30

Abstract

Abstract

Objective This paper investigates secure and covert short packet communication in multi-input multi-output (MIMO) wireless systems with location-uncertain malicious nodes over quasi-static Rician fading channels. In the considered scenario, a legitimate transmitter sends confidential short packets to a legitimate receiver, while multiple monitoring nodes attempt to detect whether the transmission exists and multiple eavesdropping nodes attempt to intercept the confidential information. Since malicious nodes may remain silent and their exact positions are unavailable to the legitimate system, their spatial uncertainty brings significant challenges to joint covertness and secrecy analysis. To address this problem, this paper establishes a unified analytical and optimization framework for secure covert short packet transmission, aiming to characterize the coupling relationship among covertness, secrecy, and reliability, and to improve the average effective secrecy and covert rate (AESCR). Methods The transmitter adopts singular value decomposition (SVD)-based precoding, and the legitimate receiver applies maximum ratio combining (MRC) to enhance the legitimate link. The monitoring nodes and eavesdropping nodes are modeled as two independent Poisson point processes (PPPs) outside a circular protection zone centered at the transmitter, which captures the spatial randomness of malicious nodes. For covertness analysis, each monitoring node is assumed to perform optimal likelihood ratio detection with full knowledge of the system model, noise power, channel state, and codebook information. By using the Chernoff bound and the Bhattacharyya coefficient, a theoretical lower bound on the minimum detection error probability of a single monitoring node is first derived. Then, by combining stochastic geometry with the distribution of the strongest monitoring node, a tractable lower bound on the average minimum detection error probability is obtained. For secrecy analysis, the finite blocklength normal approximation is used to account for both decoding error and information leakage penalties. The legitimate channel is statistically characterized according to the Rician fading condition, while the strongest eavesdropping node is analyzed through stochastic geometry. Based on these results, an approximate analytical expression for the average secrecy rate is derived. Furthermore, AESCR is introduced as a comprehensive performance metric that jointly reflects reliability, secrecy, and covertness. Under the average covert constraint and the short packet length constraint, a joint optimization problem for transmit power and packet length is formulated. By exploiting the monotonic properties of the objective function and the covert constraint, the original coupled optimization problem is transformed into a one-dimensional search problem. Results and Discussions Simulation results verify the accuracy of the theoretical derivations and reveal the influence of key system parameters. Both the simulated average minimum detection error probability and its theoretical lower bound decrease as the packet length increases, and higher transmit power further reduces the detection error probability, indicating that excessive power makes the transmission more exposed to monitoring nodes (Fig. 2). Increasing the number of monitoring-node antennas strengthens spatial reception capability and further degrades covertness (Fig. 2). Enlarging the protection zone improves covertness because malicious nodes are forced to remain farther away from the transmitter, whereas increasing the monitoring-node density weakens this benefit by raising the probability that a strong monitoring node appears near the protection-zone boundary (Fig. 3). The average secrecy rate increases with packet length and gradually approaches the asymptotic secrecy-capacity upper bound, because the finite blocklength rate penalty becomes smaller when the packet length grows (Fig. 4). The proposed AESCR first increases and then decreases with packet length, confirming the existence of an optimal packet length; this phenomenon results from the tradeoff between reduced finite-blocklength penalty and increased detection exposure (Fig. 5). Larger malicious-node density and more malicious-node antennas reduce system performance, since they enhance both monitoring and eavesdropping capabilities (Fig. 5). Relaxing the covert constraint improves the achievable AESCR, because the system can select a higher transmit power or a more favorable packet length (Fig. 6). The results under different Rician factors also show that the proposed analytical framework is applicable to both Rician and Rayleigh fading conditions (Fig. 6). Increasing the number of legitimate receive antennas improves AESCR, and a larger transmit antenna array brings additional SVD precoding gain (Fig. 7). Compared with benchmark schemes, the proposed joint optimization of transmit power and packet length consistently outperforms the scheme with fixed packet length and power-only optimization, demonstrating the necessity of jointly balancing reliability, secrecy, and covertness in MIMO short packet transmission (Fig. 8). Conclusions This paper develops a stochastic-geometry-based analytical framework for MIMO secure covert short packet communication with location-uncertain multi-antenna malicious nodes. By deriving a lower bound on the average minimum detection error probability, obtaining an approximate analytical expression for the average secrecy rate, and introducing AESCR, the proposed framework reveals the fundamental tradeoff among covertness, secrecy, and reliability under finite blocklength transmission. The results show that increasing the number of legitimate transmit and receive antennas improves secure covert performance, whereas higher malicious-node density and more malicious-node antennas degrade system performance. The existence of an optimal packet length further demonstrates that packet length and transmit power must be jointly designed. Therefore, the proposed joint optimization method provides an effective solution for secure covert short packet transmission in mission-critical and low-latency wireless systems.
- Short packet communication,
- MIMO,
- Rician fading,
- Covert communication,
- Physical layer security

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References(24)

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