Covert Transmission and Physical-Layer Security of Active RIS-RS-NOMA-Aided Communication Systems

In this article, we consider an active reconfigurable intelligent surface (ARIS)-aided non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and rate-splitting (RS)-enabled communication system, in which a base station applies RS and NOMA to the downlink transmission of a hidden user and a public user with the assistance of an ARIS in the presence of an illegal user. More specifically, the closed expressions for the outage probability (OP), covert rate, and detection error probability (DEP) are derived. Also, we present the analysis for the secrecy outage probability (SOP), and analyze the effects of detection threshold, total power consumption, RIS deployment distance, and power allocation factors on the system performance. The numerical results show that under the same total power consumption, the ARIS has a lower OP value than the passive RIS (PRIS), which can effectively overcome the “multiplicative fading" effect. Moreover, applying the ARIS can result in a larger covert rate and a higher minimum DEP value at the optimal detection threshold, and can reduce the SOP values of hidden and public users by reducing the power allocation factors. In addition, at the same minimum DEP value, the RS-NOMA scheme has a higher covert rate than the NOMA scheme.