Covert Multi-Access Communication with a Non-Covert User

In this paper, we characterize the fundamental limits of a communication system with three users (i.e., three transmitters) and a single receiver where communication from two covert users must remain undetectable to an external warden. Our results show a tradeoff between the highest rates that are simultaneously achievable for the three users. They further show that the presence of a non-covert user in the system can enhance the capacities of the covert users under stringent secret-key constraints. To derive our fundamental limits, we provide an information-theoretic converse proof and present a coding scheme that achieves the performance of our converse result. Our coding scheme is based on multiplexing different code phases, which seems to be essential to exhaust the entire tradeoff region between the rates at the covert and the two non-covert users. This property is reminiscent of the setup with multiple non-covert users, where multiplexing is also required to exhaust the entire rate-region.
Comment: To be presented at ICC2024