Enhancing covert communication in NOMA systems with joint security and covert design

The explosion of Internet-of-Thing enables several interconnected devices but also gives rise chance for unauthorized parties to compromise sensitive information through wireless communication systems. Covert communication therefore has emerged as a potential candidate for ensuring data privacy in conjunction with physical layer transmission to render two lines of defense. In this paper, we aim to enhance the individual transmission of nearby users in non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems under scenarios of an eavesdropper who monitors covert transmission before decoding covert information. For this problem, we first provide a comprehensive analysis of the NOMA system in terms of outage probability (OP), secrecy outage probability (SOP), and detection error probability (DEP), where all of them are quantified in exact and asymptotic closed-form expressions. Besides, we have also derived closed-form formulas for users’ covert and public rates. Under the system requirements of the maximal OP and SOP and the minimal DEP, we formulate the optimization of resource power allocation to: 1) minimize the OP of covert communication and 2) maximize the covert rate. Thanks to the developed analytical expressions, we obtain closed-form expressions for the sub-optimal power allocation coefficient for each problem. Simulation results validate the efficacy of the analytical mathematical frameworks and reveal that the proposed approaches of power allocation can provide attractive performance improvement compared to fixed power allocations only.