Strategic Game Model for AUV-Assisted Underwater Acoustic Covert Communication in Ocean Internet of Things

Underwater acoustic covert communication (UACC) is a promising technology for improving the security of sensitive data transmission in the Ocean Internet of Things (OIoT). Compared with traditional UACC, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) are used to improve the performance of UACC by transmitting interference signals and relaying information. However, the UACC process of the covert transmitter is vulnerable to the detector’s detection, and the AUV-assisted UACC countermeasure process lacks theoretical analysis. Hence, we propose an AUV-assisted underwater acoustic covert communication game (AUACCG) model to study the countermeasure process between the AUV-assisted covert communicator and the detector in OIoT. Specifically, we utilize AUV transmitting the interference signals to reduce the detector’s capability, analyze the utility functions and strategy set of both sides and derive the equilibrium strategies. In addition, we analyze the concealment probability and the outage probability in UACC. Then, we derive the specific Nash equilibrium strategy in AUACCG. Simulation results show that our proposal can improve the underwater acoustic covert communication performance compared with the state-of-art works.