Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and ambient backscatter communication have been envisioned as two promising technologies for the Internet-of-things due to their high spectral efficiency and energy efficiency. Motivated by this fact, we consider an ambient backscatter NOMA system in the presence of a malicious eavesdropper. Under the realistic assumptions of residual hardware impairments (RHIs), channel estimation errors (CEEs) and imperfect successive interference cancellation (ipSIC), we investigate the physical layer security (PLS) of the ambient backscatter NOMA systems with emphasis on reliability and security. In order to further improve the security of the considered system, an artificial noise scheme is proposed where the radio frequency (RF) source acts as a jammer that transmits interference signals to the legitimate receivers and eavesdropper. On this basis, the analytical expressions for the outage probability (OP) and the intercept probability (IP) are derived. To gain more insights, the asymptotic analysis and corresponding diversity orders for the OP in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime are carried out, and the asymptotic behaviors of the IP in the high main-to-eavesdropper ratio (MER) region are explored as well. Finally, the correctness of the theoretical analysis is verified by the Monte Carlo simulation results. These results show that compared with the non-ideal conditions, the reliability of the considered system is high under ideal conditions, but the security is low.

An intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) consists of a large number of low-cost reflecting elements, which can steer the incident signal collaboratively by passive beamforming. This way, IRS reconfigures the wireless environment to boost the system performance. In this paper, we consider an IRS-assisted uplink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system. The objective is to maximize the sum rate of all users under individual power constraint. The considered problem requires a joint power control at the users and beamforming design at the IRS, and is non-convex. To handle it, semidefinite relaxation is employed, which provides a near-optimal solution. Presented numerical results show that the proposed NOMA-based scheme achieves a larger sum rate than orthogonal multiple access (OMA)-based one. Moreover, the impact of the number of reflecting elements on the sum rate is revealed.

Ambient backscatter communication (AmBC) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) are two promising technologies for the future wireless communication networks owing to their high energy and spectral efficiencies. The AmBC-aided NOMA symbiotic radio is a promising technology because of possessing advantages of AmBC and NOMA. Nonetheless, when a number of devices with limited power and computation capability access to the AmBC-based NOMA symbiotic networks, communication security becomes a critical issue. In this paper, we investigate physical-layer authentication (PLA) to identify the users and prevent illegal access and malicious activities for AmBC-based NOMA symbiotic networks. Moreover, channel estimation errors are considered when calculating the probability of false alarm (PFA) and probability of detection (PD) of the far user and near user. To enhance the authentication performance, three PLA schemes for the considered networks are designed according to the multiplexing form of the authentication tags: i) PLA with shared authentication tag (PLA-SAT); ii) PLA with space division multiplexing authentication tags; iii) PLA with time-division multiplexing authentication tags. To characterize the proposed PLA schemes, we first derive the PFA and the PD of the considered AmBC-based NOMA symbiotic networks. Then, the covertness is studied in terms of outage probability and asymptotic behavior in the high signal-to-noise ratio regime. Extensive analytical and computer simulated results show that: i) The PLA-SAT scheme has better performance than the other two authentication schemes with the same threshold; ii) The outage performance of systems employing authentication schemes is worse than those without authentication; iii) There exists a trade-off between robustness and covertness.

We consider an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) wireless-powered NOMA Internet-of-Things (IoT) network, where multiple NOMA IoT devices can communicate with access point (AP) with the aid of IRS. Specifically, IoT devices can harvest energy from a nearby appropriative power station (PS) during the wireless energy transfer (WET) phase through the direct links as well as the reflecting links from IRS. Then, the harvested energy can achieve the wireless information transfer (WIT) during the uplink between IoT devices and AP by adopting NOMA protocol. A novel resource allocation scheme is proposed to maximized the sum throughput of the considered system by jointly optimizing the time allocation factor and phase shift matrices of WET and WIT. The optimization problem is non-convex due to multiple variables. We first transfer this problem into convex function by assuming one of the phase shift matrices fixed, and solve the transferred problem by obtaining closed-form solution. Then, the elements collaborative approximate (ECA) and the manifold space gradient descent (MSGD) algorithms are designed to optimize the phase shift matrix. ECA is iteratively optimizing one element and MSGD is focus on the derivation of a gradient descent over the manifold space. Numerical results indicate the sum throughput enhancement by IRS compared with no IRS, and highlight the advantages of IRS.

Simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) is becoming a prospective technology in realizing extremely low power transmission and seamless coverage for the sixth generation (6G) wireless communication era. Motivated by this, we study the secrecy performance of the STAR-RIS assisted non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) networks. To be more practical, we assume that all nodes suffer from residual hardware impairments (RHIs). To characterize the performance of the considered network, the analytical expressions of the secrecy outage probability (SOP) for NOMA users over the Nakagami- $m$ fading channels are derived. Meanwhile, the asymptotic behaviors of SOP at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are also studied. The numerical results show that: 1) The existence of the RHIs reduces the secrecy performance of the network under consideration. 2) The increase in the number of configurable elements $K$ will improve the system secrecy performance.