Secrecy analysis of a cooperative NOMA network using an EH untrusted relay

ABSTRACT

In this paper, a down-link non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system with imperfect successive interference cancellation (SIC) using Energy-Harvesting untrusted relays is investigated. These relaying nodes use in this study use a power-switching architecture to harvest energy from the sources signals and apply an amplify-and-forward protocol to forward the signals. In addition, transmit jamming or artificial noise, is generated by a source node to improve the security of the system and protect confidential source information from untrusted relays. Likewise, three relaying selection strategies are employed to examine the secrecy performance of the proposed system. In order to evaluate the performance evaluation of the proposed system, closed-form expressions of the Secrecy Outage Probability (SOP) are studied over Rayleigh fading channels and a Monte Carlo simulation is used to confirm the analytical results. Furthermore, we study the effects of various parameters, such as power allocation factors, relay node selection, the number of relays, energy harvesting efficiency and the location of relay nodes on the secure outage performances for two users of NOMA system and conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA). These results show that NOMA offers the better security performance with multiple users.

KEYWORDS:

• NOMA
• energy harvesting
• physical layer security
• untrusted relaying
• artificial noise

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the 2019 Research Fund of the University of Ulsan.