Individual secrecy of fading homogeneous multiple access wiretap channel with successive interference cancellation

We investigate individual secrecy performance in a K-user quasi-static Rayleigh fading homogeneous multiple access wiretap channel (MAC-WT), where a legitimate receiver employs successive interference cancellation (SIC) decoding. We first evaluate individual secrecy performance under an arbitrary SIC order by deriving closed-form expressions with respect to secrecy outage probability and effective secrecy throughput (EST) as main metrics. The resulting closed-form expressions disclose a significant impact on the secrecy performance from the order of SIC decoding. Therefore, we propose three SIC decoding order scheduling schemes: (1) round-robin scheme, absolutely fair and served as a benchmark; (2) suboptimal scheme, based on each user’s main channel condition; and (3) optimal scheme, based on each user’s achievable secrecy rate. Comparison results show that the last two schemes outperform the first one with regard to both the EST and the multi-user diversity gain, whereas the performance of the suboptimal scheme is highly close to that of the optimal scheme which is usually impractical due to a requirement for the eavesdropper’s channel state information (CSI).