Combat Hybrid Eavesdropping in Power-Domain NOMA: Joint Design of Timing Channel and Symbol Transformation

Abstract

In power-domain nonorthogonal multiple access, passive eavesdropping may appear among the users by successive interference cancellation. Furthermore, the external eavesdropper may do active eavesdropping (i.e., passive eavesdropping plus jamming) by a full-duplex technique. To combat this hybrid eavesdropping, we propose a novel physical layer security scheme. The main contributions in this scheme are as follows: 1) A time constellation is set up by the concept of timing channel, where each point contains several symbols and the intervals between them, exploits these intervals to carry privacy information, and can represent different values (i.e., multiple mapping rules are introduced). Based on this time constellation, different mapping rules are allocated to different users. 2) The beginning symbols of time constellation points are devised to take the information of mapping rule allocation. Moreover, an extra symbol transformation method for each beginning symbol is designed. According to these contributions, the advantages of our scheme are evident: 1) Each user only needs to judge the intervals and extract privacy information from them. It is predicted that the impact of jamming on this operation should be lower than that on directly using the modulated symbols to carry and transfer privacy information. In other words, the mistakes of privacy information acquisition with the time constellation should be less than that with the modulated symbols. 2) The mapping rule allocation and symbol transformation methods generate multiple possible values for one time constellation point. These possibilities bring the difficulty of determining the actual value represented by each point. Therefore, passive eavesdropping can be effectively suppressed.