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arXiv · 2406.13466

Unveiling Covert Semantics: Joint Source-Channel Coding Under a Covertness Constraint

Abdelaziz Bounhar·Mireille Sarkiss·Michèle Wigger
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Abstract

The fundamental limit of Semantic Communications (joint source-channel coding) is established when the transmission needs to be kept covert from an external warden. We derive information-theoretic achievability and matching converse results and we show that source and channel coding separation holds for this setup. Furthermore, we show through an experimental setup that one can train a deep neural network to achieve covert semantic communication for the classification task. Our numerical experiments confirm our theoretical findings, which indicate that for reliable joint source-channel coding the number of transmitted source symbols can only scale as the square-root of the number of channel uses.

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Abdelaziz Bounhar, Mireille Sarkiss, Michèle Wigger. 2024-06-19. Unveiling Covert Semantics: Joint Source-Channel Coding Under a Covertness Constraint. https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.13466

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