Secure Transmission in NOMA-Enabled Industrial IoT With Resource-Constrained Untrusted Devices

The security of confidential information associated with devices in the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) network is a serious concern. This article focuses on achieving a non orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-enabled secure IIoT network in the presence of untrusted devices by jointly optimizing resources, such as decoding order and power allocated to devices. Assuming that the devices are resource-constrained for performing perfect successive interference cancellation, we characterize the residual interference at receivers with the linear model. Firstly, considering all possible decoding orders in an untrusted scenario, we obtain secure decoding orders that are feasible to obtain a positive secrecy rate for each device. Then, under the secrecy fairness criterion, we formulate a joint optimization problem of maximizing the minimum secrecy rate among devices. Since the formulated problem is non-convex and combinatorial, we first obtain the optimal secure decoding order and then solve it for power allocation by analyzing Karush–Kuhn–Tucker points. Thus, we provide the closed-form global-optimal solution of the formulated optimization problem. Numerical results validate the analytical claims and demonstrate that the conventional decoding order and assigning more power allocation to weak devices, as presumed in many NOMA works, is not an optimal strategy from the secrecy fairness viewpoint. Also, average percentage gain of about 22.75%, 50.58%, 94.59%, and 98.16%, respectively, is achieved by jointly optimized solution over benchmarks ODEP (optimal decoding order, equal power allocation), ODFP (optimal decoding order, fixed power allocation), FDEP (fixed decoding order, equal power allocation), and FDFP (fixed decoding order, fixed power allocation).