Secrecy Performance Analysis of Relay Selection in Cooperative NOMA Systems

This paper investigates the security performance of two relay selection schemes for cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems, where K randomly distributed relays are employed with either decode-and-forward (DF) or amplify-and-forward (AF) protocols. More particularly, two-stage relay selection (TRS) and optimal relay selection (ORS) schemes are taken into consideration. To characterize the secrecy behaviors of these RS schemes, new closed-form expressions of both exact and asymptotic secrecy outage probability (SOP) are derived. We confirm that the SOP of the TRS scheme is equal to that of the ORS scheme for DF/AF-based NOMA systems. Based on the analytical results, the secrecy diversity orders achieved by the pair of RS schemes for the DF/AF-based NOMA systems are K, which are equal to the number of relays. It is shown that the secrecy diversity orders for the cooperative NOMA systems are determined by the number of the relays. The numerical results are presented to demonstrate that: 1) the secrecy performance of the AF-based NOMA system outperforms that of the DF-based NOMA system, when not all DF relays successfully decode the received information; 2) with the number of relays increasing, the SOP of these RS schemes for the DF-/AF-based NOMA systems becomes lower, and; 3) the TRS/ORS schemes are capable of achieving better secrecy outage behaviors compared with random RS and orthogonal multiple access-based RS schemes.