Secure STBC-Aided NOMA in Cognitive IIoT Networks

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has been recognized as having the potential to offer substantial benefit to a wide range of industrial sectors. However, the widespread development and deployment of IIoT pose a set of challenges, including the shortage of spectrum resources and network security. Given the heterogeneity of IIoT devices, conventional cryptographic security techniques are not sufficient, since they suffer from challenges, including computation, storages, latency, and interoperability. In this article, we present a physical layer security analysis for cognitive IIoT networks. In our system, IIoT devices opportunistically utilize the primary spectrum; thereby improving spectrum efficiency and allowing access to a large number of devices. Specifically, the considered network uses space-time block coding (STBC) in conjunction with nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in underlay cognitive mode to realize data transmission for IIoT devices with high-spectrum efficiency. The secure STBC-NOMA transmission model is established by taking into account the interference from a primary user. New approximate and asymptotic expressions of secrecy outage probability (SOP) for the secondary users (SUs) are derived to characterize the system’s secrecy performance. In addition, the SU’s closed-form secrecy ergodic rate (ER) is provided. The proposed STBC-NOMA approach, when compared to the classic single antenna (SA)-based NOMA, achieves better SOP performance for all SUs, as confirmed by both analytical and simulation findings. Furthermore, we show that the proposed STBC-NOMA framework improves the SOP performance of weaker users. Additionally, the STBC-NOMA framework outperforms the SA-NOMA framework in terms of secrecy ER performance for all SUs.