Secure Body-Centric Internet of Things Networks: Physical Layer Security versus Covert Communication

With the growing popularity of wearable devices, body-centric networks have become the focus of Internet of Things (IoT) research. However, malicious eavesdroppers and attackers pose threats to user privacy and network secrecy. Fortunately, physical layer security (PLS) communication and covert communication (CC) have been introduced and can be used in body-centric networks. However, network performance of both secrecy techniques has not been analyzed with an accurate wireless fading model. To fill this research gap, we study a body-centric IoT communication system with information secrecy features based on PLS and CC techniques. By adopting the Alternate Rician Shadowed fading model, we derive closed-form expressions for the secrecy outage probability and secrecy rate in PLS, and the detection error probability and covert rate in CC. To provide more explicit guidance, an algorithm for the selection of PLS and CC techniques is proposed, which aims to reach a high transmission performance state while ensuring communication security and covertness. The secrecy rate and covert rate are analytically and empirically compared. We insightfully find that, with the help of a friendly jammer, CC performs better than PLS, especially with high transmit power. However, an upper boundary of transmit power exists to ensure communication covertness in CC.