Physical layer security of cooperative NOMA for IoT networks under I/Q imbalance

In this paper, we investigate the reliability and security of cooperative dual-hop non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) for internet-of-thing (IoT) networks, in which the transceivers consider a detrimental factor of in-phase and quadrature-phase imbalance (IQI). The communication between the source and destination is accomplished through a decode-and-forward (DF) relay in the presence of an eavesdropper. In order to characterize the performance of the considered system, exact analytical expressions for the outage probability (OP) and intercept probability (IP) are derived in closed-form. Furthermore, to better understanding the performance of the considered system, we further derive the asymptotic expressions of OP in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime and IP at the high main eavesdropping ratio (MER) region. A large number of analysis and Monte Carlo simulation results show that the existence of IQI usually increases the corresponding OP and reduces the IP, which means that reduces the reliability of the system and improves the security. In addition, the provided results provide useful insights into the trade-off between reliability and security of secure cooperative communication systems.