Securing UAV-Aided NOMA Wireless Powered Communications via Artificial Noise

For an uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV)-aided energy-harvesting non-orthogonal multiple access (EH-NOMA) network, where an untrusted far user (UFU) overhears the confidential transmissions from base station (BS) to the trusted near user (TNU), how to ensure the security of TNU and achieve the reliability of UFU becomes an open issue. The traditional artificial noise (TAN) scheme just guarantees the security of TNU without focusing on the reliability of UFU, while the non-artificial noise (NAN) scheme only ensures the reliability of UFU but sacrifices the security of TNU. Thus, the TAN and NAN schemes are unable to guarantee the fairness between TNU and UFU. To this end, we employ digital network coding to encrypt confidential signals with artificial noise signals, and the proposed artificial noise (PAN) scheme not only protects the confidential transmissions of TNU but also guarantees the reliability of UFU. We use security-reliability tradeoff (SRT) and interference-reliability tradeoff (IRT) to evaluate the performance of TNU and UFU, respectively. Additionally, we derive the exact and asymptotic expressions of outage probabilities for both TNU and UFU, and the intercept probability for TNU. Numerical results verify the accuracy of our theoretical results and demonstrate that: 1) the SRT and IRT performance of the PAN scheme is better than that of the TAN and NAN schemes; 2) the PAN scheme achieves better secrecy for TNU compared to the TAN scheme. Meanwhile, the reliability of UFU in the PAN scheme is almost the same as the NAN scheme, indicating the PAN scheme simultaneously realizes the security of TNU and the reliability of UFU and the fairness of NOMA users is achieved by the PAN scheme.