Secure wireless communications for STAR‐RIS‐assisted millimetre‐wave NOMA uplink networks

Abstract

AbstractThis paper explores the potential application of simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR‐RIS) in improving the physical layer security (PLS) of millimetre wave (mmWave) non‐orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) uplink communications. In particular, the legitimate users on both sides of STAR‐RIS send confidential information simultaneously to the base station (BS) while keeping it secret from the eavesdroppers near the BS by exploiting the STAR‐RIS to proactively regulate the electromagnetic propagation environment. By jointly designing the transmit power, the active beamforming at the BS, and the reflecting/transmitting coefficients at the STAR‐RIS, the authors' goal is to maximize the minimum secrecy capacity subject to the successive interference cancellation decoding order constraints. Due to the non‐convexity of the formulated problem, an efficient algorithm is proposed by capitalizing on alternating optimization, a penalty‐based approach, successive convex approximation, and semi‐definite relaxation. Firstly, a two‐layer iterative algorithm based on the penalty for the joint beamforming optimization sub‐problem is proposed. Then, the non‐convex problem is transformed into a convex positive semi‐definite programming problem for the transmit power sub‐problem. Numerical simulation results reveal that the STAR‐RIS‐aided system has more tremendous advantages and effectiveness in improving the PLS of mmWave NOMA uplink communication compared with the benchmark schemes.