Secrecy performance analysis of IRS-NOMA systems

In this paper, we propose to utilize an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) as a promising technology to enhance the coverage and physical layer security of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system. In particular, an IRS-assisted NOMA system is considered with the aid of careful channel ordering of the NOMA users, in which the transmitter sends superposed signals to multiple legitimate users by virtue of the IRS in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers. Meanwhile, the secrecy performance of the IRS-assisted NOMA system is investigated under two wiretapping cases: non-colluding and colluding external eavesdroppers. In the non-colluding case, eavesdroppers operate independently, while in the colluding case, every eavesdroppers can combine their observations to decode the messages. To this end, we derive the approximate closed-form expressions for the secrecy outage probability (SOP) and the asymptotic SOP for each wiretapping case. Also, we assume that the phase of the IRS elements is set by using the ON–OFF control method. Based on analytical results, we show that the secrecy diversity order of the IRS-NOMA at legitimate users is in connection with the number of reflecting elements. From the numerical results, it can be seen that the IRS-NOMA can achieve superior secrecy performance with increasing the number of reflecting elements of the IRS. However, we also find out that using the finite ON state reflective elements can improve the secrecy performance. Actually, increasing the number of ON state reflective elements above five has a negative effect on the system’s secrecy performance.