Author Identifier

Shihao Yan: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4586-1926

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Title

IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications

Volume

24

Issue

4

First Page

3499

Last Page

3514

Publisher

IEEE

School

School of Science

Comments

This is an an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published by IEEE. © 2025 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.

Yu, X., Shen, K., Rui, Y., Yan, S., Jia, G., & Guizani, M. (2025). Covert performance of NOMA system with hardware impairments in Nakagami fading channel. IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 24(4), 3499-3514. https://doi.org/10.1109/TWC.2025.3531642

Abstract

In this paper, the covert performance of the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system with random transmit power under hardware impairments over the Nakagami fading channel is investigated, where the stronger user serves as a covert user (Bob) and receives the secure message from the transmitter (Alice) under the cover of the weaker user (Carl). The transmission is monitored by a warden (Willie). To improve the covert performance, we randomize the transmit power of Alice, which is subject to a uniform distribution. Based on this, considering the randomness of covert user's position, we derive the closed-form expressions of the average detection error probability (ADEP) respectively for the warden with instantaneous and statistical channel information. Then, the optimal detection threshold based on one-dimensional (1D) search method is presented for minimizing the ADEP. To simplify the optimal threshold, the suboptimal threshold with low complexity is also derived. Besides, the outage probability (OP) of the system is deduced for performance analysis and optimization. Under the constraints of covertness and reliability, the power allocation (PA) coefficient is optimized to minimize the OP of the covert user, and the 1D search scheme is proposed to obtain the optimal solution. Also, a suboptimal scheme is presented to reduce the complexity of the optimal scheme. Numerical results are presented to validate our theoretical analysis, and show that randomizing the transmit power can effectively improve the covert performance. Moreover, the system with two optimized thresholds can obtain lower ADEP than that with a fixed threshold, and the system with two optimized PA coefficients has a lower OP than that with a fixed PA.

DOI

10.1109/TWC.2025.3531642

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Available for download on Friday, January 29, 2027

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Link to publisher version (DOI)

10.1109/TWC.2025.3531642