Time-Division Transmission is Optimal for Covert Communication over Broadcast Channels

We consider a covert communication scenario where a legitimate transmitter wishes to communicate simultaneously to two legitimate receivers while ensuring that the communication is not detected by an adversary, also called the warden. The legitimate receivers and the adversary observe the transmission from the legitimate transmitter via a three-user discrete or Gaussian memoryless broadcast channel. We focus on the case where the “no-input” symbol is not redundant, i.e., the output distribution at the warden induced by the no-input symbol is not a mixture of the output distributions induced by other input symbols, so that the covert communication is governed by the square root law, i.e., at most Θ( √ n) bits can be transmitted over n channel uses. We show that for such a setting of covert communication over broadcast channels, a simple time-division strategy achieves the optimal throughputs. Our result implies that a code that uses two separate optimal point-to-point codes each designed for the constituent channels and each used for a fraction of the time is optimal in the sense that it achieves the best constants of the √ n-scaling for the throughputs. Our proof strategy combines several elements in the network information theory literature, including concave envelope representations of the capacity regions of broadcast channels and El Gamal’s outer bound for more capable broadcast channels.