Enhancing vehicular NOMA communication security through reconfigurable intelligent surfaces

Physical layer security (PLS) aims to ensure the confidentiality and authenticity of transmitted data by capitalizing on the inherent randomness of wireless channels. Owing to the popularity of intelligent transportation systems (ITSs), PLS research has sparked renewed interest in the wireless research community. This paper investigates the performance of secure communication in the context of a vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication scenario by employing a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS). Further, we introduce the concept of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) to reduce latency and improve communication efficiency in V2V networks. This study aims to comprehensively analyze secrecy performance, encompassing parameters like average secrecy capacity (ASC), secrecy outage probability (SOP) and probability of non-zero secrecy capacity (PNZSC). Our research aims to highlight the efficacy of RIS in providing secure and reliable communication within V2V NOMA networks. Ultimately, our study contributes to advancing secure communication protocols in intelligent transportation systems.