Secure Transmission Designs for NOMA Systems Against Internal and External Eavesdropping

Abstract

The key idea of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is to serve multiple users in the same resource block to improve the spectral efficiency. Whereas due to the resource sharing, a security flaw of NOMA emerges in the presence of internal untrusted users, especially untrusted near users who are closer to the base station and can easily access the confidential information for paired far users. To mitigate the flaw, in this paper, we investigate the reliable and secure transmission of NOMA systems with untrusted near users, and propose joint beamforming and power allocation (JBP) scheme for the scenario. Meanwhile, from security point of view, we extend to a worse-case scenario where both untrusted near users and external eavesdroppers exist, and propose joint artificial noise aided beamforming and power allocation (JANBP) scheme to achieve a reliable and secure transmission for the scenario. The exact and asymptotic closed-form expressions of secrecy outage probability (SOP) for the two scenarios are derived to evaluate the secrecy performance achieved by the proposed schemes, respectively. The analysis and simulation results show the superiority of the proposed JBP and JANBP schemes in terms of combating internal and external eavesdropping, and also indicate the two schemes can achieve the same SOP at high SNR.