Power Allocation and Decoding Order Selection for Secrecy Fairness in Downlink Cooperative NOMA with Untrusted Receivers under Imperfect SIC

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been recognized as a promising multiple access technique for enhanced spectral efficiency in the current and next-generation wireless networks. In this paper, we examine a realistic NOMA model where users, assisted by a regenerative relay, cannot be fully trusted. We address the challenge of ensuring secure access for these users while accounting for the error propagation in successive interference cancellation (SIC) during the decoding process. For such, we formulate and solve two optimization problems, viz. maximizing the minimum secrecy rate of the users and maximizing the sum secrecy rate of the users, while accounting for SIC errors and the constraint on the power budget. For each case, we derive the optimal power allocation solution to achieve positive secrecy rates despite imperfect SIC. Simulation results provide key insights on the obtained secrecy rates and power allocations, factoring in residual interference. The joint optimal solution for the decoding order and power allocation is compared with different benchmark schemes: optimal decoding order and equal power allocation, fixed decoding order and equal power allocation, fixed decoding order and optimal power allocation, and optimal decoding order and channel-based power allocation. Our proposed framework demonstrates average performance gains of about 47.62 dB, 50.79 dB, 54.02 dB and 39.83 dB over these schemes and, hence, the fact that the proposed framework can substantially improve the secrecy performance.