Secure and Covert MIMO Short packet Communication 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 Communication 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 Communication 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 Communication 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, 62071486)

Received Date: 2026-01-16
Accepted Date: 2026-05-12
Rev Recd Date: 2026-05-09

Available Online: 2026-05-30

Abstract

Abstract

Objective This paper investigates secure and covert short-packet communication in Multiple-Input Multiple-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. Meanwhile, multiple monitoring nodes (Willie nodes) attempt to detect whether transmission occurs, and multiple eavesdropping nodes (Eve nodes) attempt to intercept the confidential information. Because malicious nodes may remain silent and their exact locations are unavailable to the legitimate system, their spatial uncertainty poses major challenges to joint covertness and secrecy analysis. To address this problem, a unified analytical and optimization framework is established for secure and covert short-packet transmission. The framework is used to characterize the coupling 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. Monitoring nodes and eavesdropping nodes are modeled as two independent Poisson Point Processes (PPPs) outside a circular protection zone centered at the transmitter. This model captures the spatial randomness of malicious nodes. For covertness analysis, each monitoring node is assumed to perform optimal Likelihood Ratio Test (LRT)-based detection with full knowledge of the system model, noise power, channel state, and codebook information. 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. Stochastic geometry is then combined with the distribution of the strongest monitoring node to obtain a tractable lower bound on the average minimum detection error probability. For secrecy analysis, the finite blocklength normal approximation is used to account for decoding error and information leakage penalties. The legitimate channel is statistically characterized under Rician fading conditions, and the strongest eavesdropping node is analyzed through stochastic geometry. Based on these results, an approximate analytical expression for the average secrecy rate is derived. AESCR is proposed as a comprehensive performance metric that jointly reflects reliability, secrecy, and covertness. Under the average covertness constraint and the short-packet length constraint, a joint optimization problem for transmit power and packet length is formulated. By using the monotonic properties of the objective function and the covertness 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 effects of key system parameters. Both the simulated average minimum detection error probability and its theoretical lower bound decrease as the packet length increases. Higher transmit power further reduces the detection error probability, indicating that excessive power makes 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. However, 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 decreases as the packet length grows (Fig. 4). AESCR first increases and then decreases with packet length, confirming the existence of an optimal packet length. This behavior results from the tradeoff between the reduced finite blocklength penalty and increased detection exposure (Fig. 5). Higher malicious-node density and more malicious-node antennas degrade system performance because they enhance both monitoring and eavesdropping capabilities (Fig. 5). Relaxing the covertness constraint improves the achievable AESCR because the system can select a higher transmit power or a more favorable packet length (Fig. 6). Results under different Rician factors 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 provides 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. This result demonstrates the need to jointly balance reliability, secrecy, and covertness in MIMO short-packet transmission (Fig. 8). Conclusions This paper develops a stochastic-geometry-based analytical framework for secure and covert MIMO 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 proposing AESCR, the 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 and covert performance, whereas higher malicious-node density and more malicious-node antennas degrade system performance. The existence of an optimal packet length further shows that packet length and transmit power should be jointly designed. The proposed joint optimization method therefore provides an effective solution for secure and covert short-packet transmission in mission-critical and low-latency wireless systems.
- Short packet communication,
- Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO),
- Rician fading,
- Covert communication,
- Physical layer security

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References(24)

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