Ambient backscatter communication (AmBC) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) are two promising technologies for the future wireless communication networks owing to their high energy and spectral efficiencies. The AmBC-aided NOMA symbiotic radio is a promising technology because of possessing advantages of AmBC and NOMA. Nonetheless, when a number of devices with limited power and computation capability access to the AmBC-based NOMA symbiotic networks, communication security becomes a critical issue. In this paper, we investigate physical-layer authentication (PLA) to identify the users and prevent illegal access and malicious activities for AmBC-based NOMA symbiotic networks. Moreover, channel estimation errors are considered when calculating the probability of false alarm (PFA) and probability of detection (PD) of the far user and near user. To enhance the authentication performance, three PLA schemes for the considered networks are designed according to the multiplexing form of the authentication tags: i) PLA with shared authentication tag (PLA-SAT); ii) PLA with space division multiplexing authentication tags; iii) PLA with time-division multiplexing authentication tags. To characterize the proposed PLA schemes, we first derive the PFA and the PD of the considered AmBC-based NOMA symbiotic networks. Then, the covertness is studied in terms of outage probability and asymptotic behavior in the high signal-to-noise ratio regime. Extensive analytical and computer simulated results show that: i) The PLA-SAT scheme has better performance than the other two authentication schemes with the same threshold; ii) The outage performance of systems employing authentication schemes is worse than those without authentication; iii) There exists a trade-off between robustness and covertness.
Li et al. (2023) studied this question.