AUV-Assisted Underwater Acoustic Green Covert Communication Dynamic Evolutionary Game Model in Internet of Underwater Things

Abstract

Underwater acoustic covert communication (UACC) is an important way to improve the security of sensitive data transmission in Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT). The detection of UACC is also rapidly developing with the advancement of sonar network technology, leading to the countermeasure of UACC becoming a research hotspot. Game theory, as an effective mathematical tool for describing UACC countermeasures, has been widely applied in static countermeasure research. However, the dynamic countermeasure of UACC is closer to the practical situation and needs more theoretical analysis. Therefore, we propose a dynamic game model for AUV-assisted UACC (AUACCDG) to study the dynamic countermeasure process between the AUV-assisted covert communication and detection groups. Specifically, we first establish a dynamic evolutionary game to describe the countermeasure process between the covert communicators and the detectors and then study the dynamic stability through the replicator dynamics (RD). Finally, we analyze the conditions for the existence of evolutionary stability strategies (ESS) in AUACCDG. Simulation results showed that our proposal can effectively improve the performance of UACC and obtain the higher energy efficiency compared to existing literature.