In this paper, an Internet-of-Things (IoT) system containing a relay selection is studied as employing an emerging multiple access scheme, namely non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). This paper proposes a new scheme to consider secure performance, to be called relay selection NOMA (RS-NOMA). In particular, we consider metrics to evaluate secure performance in such an RS-NOMA system where a base station (master node in IoT) sends confidential messages to two main sensors (so-called NOMA users) under the influence of an external eavesdropper. In the proposed IoT scheme, both two NOMA sensors and an illegal sensor are served with different levels of allocated power at the base station. It is noticed that such RS-NOMA operates in two hop transmission of the relaying system. We formulate the closed-form expressions of secure outage probability (SOP) and the strictly positive secure capacity (SPSC) to examine the secrecy performance under controlling setting parameters such as transmit signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the number of selected relays, channel gains, and threshold rates. The different performance is illustrated as performing comparisons between NOMA and orthogonal multiple access (OMA). Finally, the advantage of NOMA in secure performance over orthogonal multiple access (OMA) is confirmed both analytically and numerically.
Keywords: IoT; NOMA; relay selection; secure outage probability; strictly positive secure capacity.