Performance Analysis of Underwater RSMA-Assisted Covert Wireless Communications

This paper investigates the covert communication performance of a radio frequency underwater acoustic communication (RF-UAC) system deploying rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA). The proposed system aims to enhance the covertness of communication signals while maintaining reliable communications for legitimate users. In this context, we model the RF link using the Rayleigh distribution and the UAC link using the K − µ shadow distribution. Moreover, We analytically evaluate key performance metrics for the proposed system, including the detection error probability, outage probability and covert communication rate under various system parameters, such as signal-to-noise ratio thresholds and power allocation between public and private streams. Our extensive numerical investigations validate the proposed analytical expressions, demonstrating the role of key system and channel parameters on the performance of RSMA-assisted RF-UAC communications.