In this article, we investigate covert millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications with finite blocklength, where a multiantenna transmitter sends covert messages to a legitimate receiver in the presence of spatially random wardens. Both the phase array (PA) and linear frequency diverse array (LFDA) beamforming schemes, which are designed to maximize the antenna gain from the transmitter to the legitimate receiver, are investigated to improve the covert communication performance. First, the novel expressions of covert communication constraint and average effective covert throughput (AECT) are derived for both beamforming schemes. Then, taking into account the constraint of maximal available blocklength, the optimal transmit power and blocklength are determined for maximizing the AECT. Typically, comparing to the benchmark with fixed blocklength, the enhancement of AECT by utilizing the optimized blocklength enlarges as the density of wardens increases. In addition, it is observed that increasing the maximal available blocklength cannot always improve the maximum AECT due to the tradeoff between the transmit power and blocklength. Furthermore, it is shown that the maximum AECT varies for different directions of the legitimate receiver under both the beamforming schemes, and the transmitter can adaptively choose the PA or LFDA beamforming scheme to improve the covertness performance against spatially random wardens.

Considering the diversified communication requirements in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks, this article proposes a nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme which pairs two types of typical users, i.e., delay-sensitive user (DSU) and security-required user (SRU) to share the same nonorthogonal communication resources. We focus on the investigation of the secure transmission for the SRU while guaranteeing the communication requirements of the DSUs at the high priority. Specifically, the delay requirement of the DSUs and the security demand of the SRU are guaranteed by using short-packet communications and the maximal ratio transmission (MRT) scheme, respectively. Since the packets cannot always be detected correctly in the short-packet communications, a novel power allocation strategy is designed sophisticatedly to avoid the outage performance floor at the SRU caused by the short-packet communications. A set of closed-form expressions of the connection outage probability (COP), secrecy outage probability, and effective secrecy throughput (EST) of the SRU are derived over Nakagami-m channels in the proposed NOMA scheme and also the benchmark OMA scheme. Besides, we provide the security- reliability tradeoff (SRT) and security-efficiency tradeoff (SET) results for obtaining more insights into system performance. Results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed NOMA scheme over the benchmark OMA scheme in terms of the COP, EST, SRT, and SET when the transmitter is equipped with multiple antennas.

In this paper, we design a secure transmission scheme in hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) assisted cognitive non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) networks, where a security-required user (SRU) is paired with a quality of service (QoS)-sensitive user (QSU) to perform NOMA. To elaborate, the QoS requirement of the QSU is guaranteed by a cognitive power allocation scheme, while the HARQ technique is employed to mitigate the successive interference cancellation (SIC) errors and improve the secrecy performance of the SRU. For reducing information leakage, a randomized retransmission NOMA (RR-NOMA) scheme is designed, where the retransmitted signals are generated from independent randomized codebooks. In this scheme, the closed-form expressions for the connection outage probability (COP), the average number of transmission (ANT), the secrecy outage probability (SOP), and effective secrecy throughput (EST) of the SRU are derived. In addition, as benchmarks, the performance analyses for the fixed retransmission (FR-NOMA) scheme and the randomized retransmission orthogonal multiple access (RR-OMA) scheme are also provided. Results show a trade-off between SOP and COP or EST, which is denoted by security-reliability trade-off (SRT) or security-efficiency trade-off (SET). Furthermore, simulation results show that the HARQ technique improves SRT and the RR-NOMA scheme achieves better SET than the FR-NOMA scheme in the low SOP region. We further conduct asymptotic analysis in the RR-NOMA, FR-NOMA and RR-OMA schemes. Asymptotic results demonstrate that the three schemes achieve the same ANT and the RR-NOMA scheme obtains better secrecy performance than the RR-OMA scheme and equal secrecy performance to the FR-NOMA scheme in terms of both EST and SOP.

This paper investigates the secure transmission in hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ)-assisted non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) networks, where a security-required (SR) user is paired with an opportunity-served (OS) user to perform NOMA. Different from the previous works where NOMA and HARQ are separately considered for secure transmissions, in this paper, both NOMA and HARQ are utilized to enhance the security of the SR user. We derive the closed-form expressions for connection outage probability (COP), secrecy outage probability (SOP), reliable and secure transmission probability (RSP) and effective secrecy throughput (EST) of the SR user in both maximum ratio combining (MRC) and selection combining (SC) schemes. The security-reliability trade-off (SRT) results of the SR user in both MRC and SC schemes are also provided. Analysis and simulation results show that HARQ improves secrecy performance in MRC and SC schemes in terms of RSP, especially in low transmit power region. Besides, since every retransmission is utilized in the MRC scheme, it strictly outperforms the SC scheme in terms of the SRT metric. However, the SC scheme has the potential to achieve higher EST than the MRC scheme by optimizing the transmit power or the power allocation factor. Significantly, the quality of service (QoS) of the OS user can be guaranteed by pairing an SR user who is far away from the transmitter and the secrecy performance of the SR user can be enhanced by pairing an OS user.