Power Control for Secrecy Fairness-Aware Regenerative Relaying in Untrusted NOMA

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been recognized as a promising multiple access technique to improve the spectral efficiency of the fifth-generation (5G) and beyond networks. However, the successive interference cancellation (SIC) based decoding used at the receivers makes NOMA prone to critical security risks. In this paper, we consider a regenerative relay-assisted dual-user downlink NOMA communication model. To ensure the robustness of the model, we also take into account the error propagation in SIC occurring in the decoding process. Our design goal being to provide security to both users, we propose an optimal power management strategy, so as to maximize the secrecy rate of the users under the impact of imperfect SIC. The optimal power allocation solution is obtained such that positive secrecy rate is achieved at both of the end receivers, while accounting for SIC errors. Analytical expressions of the secrecy rates are derived to analyze the secrecy performance. Simulation results are also presented, and provide key insights on the obtained secrecy rate and power allocation coefficients with residual interference. The achieved gains prove that the proposed model can substantially improve the secrecy performance.