Secrecy energy-efficient multi-user NOMA: closed-form solution to bi-criterion formulation

This paper investigates the secrecy energy-efficiency (SEE) of a multi-user downlink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) transmission in the presence of a passive eavesdropper. The SEE, capturing the trade-off between the achievable secrecy sum-rate and the power consumption, is here formulated as a bi-criterion optimization problem that is shown to be convex. As such, the characterization of the Pareto-boundary boils down to maximizing the scalarized trade-off between the secrecy sum-rate and the power consumption, which is solved in closed-form. Finally, this obtained closed-form is exploited to maximize the ratio between the secrecy sum-rate and the power consumption. Our numerical results highlight a significant relative SEE gain between NOMA and OMA.