Impact of Residual Hardware Impairment on the IoT Secrecy Performance of RIS-Assisted NOMA Networks

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technology is expected to effectively improve the spectrum efficiency of fifth-generation and later wireless networks. As a new technology, reconfigurable Intelligent surfaces (RIS) can achieve high spectral and energy efficiency with a low cost in wireless networks. These are achieved by integrating a great quantity of low-cost passive reflective units (RUs) on the plane. In this article, in order to meet the needs of high efficiency, low power consumption, and wide coverage, we combine RIS-assisted NOMA technology with the internet of things (IoT). Because in the actual wireless communication system, the residual hardware impairment (RHI) characteristics of the actual transceiver equipment will have an important impact on system secrecy performance. Therefore, the study will propose a single eavesdropper RIS-assisted downlink NOMA system with RHI (E-RHI-RIS-NOMA). The study will also investigate the impact of RHI on the physical layer security (PLS) performance of the system and the closed-form expression of the user’s secrecy outage probability (SOP) is derived. Finally, the simulation results show that 1) the main factors affecting the SOP are the quantity of RUs in RIS, the transmit SNR, and the target data rate, 2) it is proved that the hardware impairment of the transceiver harms the system’s secrecy outage performance while the severity of the impact of RHI on the system performance depends on the transmit SNR and target data rate. Moreover, RHI at different nodes has a different influence on system secrecy performance. 3) the system performance of RIS relying on NOMA is improved compared with orthogonal multiple access (OMA) and conventional NOMA.