Performance of Cooperative NOMA Systems under Passive Eavesdropping

Abstract

A key feature of the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique is that users with better channel conditions have prior information about the messages of other users. The technique to exploit the prior knowledge of strong users in order to improve the performance of weak users is known as cooperative NOMA. In this paper, we study the physical layer security in such a cooperative NOMA system. In order to reduce the complexity, the considered system in this paper has two users. Through the cooperative NOMA concept, the performance of the weak user is enhanced by the strong user. Given that there is an eavesdropper in the system that can hear all transmissions, we study the secrecy rate of the strong and the weak users. More specifically, we make an attempt to derive the secrecy outage probability (SOP) of both the users. Due to the intractable nature of the exact analysis for the weak user, we provide the closed form expression for the SOP of this user in high SNR regime while keeping the exactness for the strong user. Through numerical simulations, we verify the correctness of our analytical derivations under different scenarios. Besides, we provide the insights of achieving optimal secrecy performance in such a system.