Covert Communication of STAR-RIS Aided NOMA Networks

Abstract

This paper investigates covert communication in simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) assisted non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems, assuming for the sake of being more practical that the successive interference cancellation (SIC) is defective. To assess the covertness performance of the considered system, we first derive closed-form expressions for the detection error probability, the optimal judgment threshold and the average minimum detection error probability of the warden, as well as the outage probability of the NOMA user pair. Then an optimization problem to maximize the effective covert rate (ECR) is proposed. Simulation results verify that the maximum ECR of the considered system could be increased by varying the different proportions of transmission and reflection components of the STAR-RIS.