Partial-NOMA Based Physical Layer Security: Forwarding Design and Secrecy Analysis

Due to the inherent broadcast characteristics of wireless communications, the data transmission is difficult to be shielded from unintended recipients. Secure communications over wireless channel is regarded as an effective way to overcome this issue in the design of wireless networks. In this paper, a new cooperative relaying system based on partial non-orthogonal multiple access (P-NOMA) is proposed, where two relays help the communications between the source and destination nodes in the presence of an eavesdropper (Eve). Specifically, after receiving the P-NOMA signals transmitted from the base station, the relay nodes decode and forward the receptions under the attack of a passive Eve. To improve the physical layer security (PLS) of the proposed system, we design four cooperative schemes for signals decoded at the relays and destination, where maximum ratio combination (MRC) technique is adopted to both destination and Eve to construe the worst case for achievable secrecy rate. Without lose of generality, the channel conditions (weak or strong), new power allocations, decoding principles and Eve locations are considered in designing forwarding schemes. In particular, to further improve the achievable secrecy rate, we also propose that, if the Eve locating near to the weak relay node, the weak relay only forwards the signal with lower power allocation factor at the base station. The closed-form expressions of the achievable secrecy rates are derived for the proposed schemes over Rayleigh fading and Nakagami- $m$ fading channels, which well match the simulation results. By means of the numerical result, it corroborates the superiority of the proposed P-NOMA schemes over the conventional NOMA schemes. It is also revealed that, with an increasing overlap ratio, the advantage in terms of the secrecy rate becomes more remarkable.