Null-Steering Beamforming for Enhancing the Physical Layer Security of Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access System

This paper addresses enhancing the physical layer security of a downlink non-orthogonal multiple access systems. The proposed scheme consists of a base station, multiple legitimate users, and an eavesdropper. In each transmission slot, the base station communicates with two paired users, under the malicious attempts of the eavesdropper to intercept the information messages. In order to impair the eavesdropper’s channel without affecting the legitimate paired users, a jamming signal is injected into the system by means of null-steering beamforming. In null-steering precoding, the jamming signal is directed toward the malicious node while being suppressed in the legitimate users’ directions. Null-steering jamming is exploited in two different mainstreams, namely, self-cooperative and nonself-cooperative jamming. In the self-cooperative strategy, the base station implements the null-steering beamformer to transmit the jamming signal during the information exchange with the legitimate users, whereas in the nonself-cooperative jamming scheme, idle legitimate users (helpers) utilize the harvested energy in the first phase to transmit the jamming signal toward the eavesdropper in the second phase during the base station communication with the legitimate users. The outage behavior in the two considered scenarios is investigated, and the secrecy outage probability for both paired users is derived and provided in closed-form expressions. Numerical simulations are performed to validate the derived analytical results and to compare the two considered strategies secrecy performance. Comparisons yield that self-cooperative jamming has better outage behavior unless the number of helpers in the system is large enough.