Physical Layer Security of Cooperative NOMA Systems with an Untrusted User

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) can be combined with physical layer security technology to greatly improve spectral efficiency while tackling security issues for the Internet of Things (IoT) networks. This paper investigates the security performance in a fifth-generation (5G) downlink NOMA system with an untrusted user in the presence of imperfect successive interference cancellation (SIC). Analytical expressions of secrecy outage probability (SOP) and connection outage probability (COP) are derived as performance metrics to evaluate the secrecy of the proposed system. In order to further improve the secrecy performance, we propose an optimal power allocation scheme based on two users' different quality of service (QoS) requirements and obtain a closed-form solution of the optimal parameter. Through numerical simulations and exhaustive search algorithm, we validate the correctness of the derived analytical results. It is proved that the proposed power allocation scheme can achieve the optimal secrecy performance.