Fluid Antennas Meet Intelligent Surfaces: Security Analysis of NOMA Systems Under Hardware Impairments

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the security of NOMA systems combining fluid antennas and intelligent surfaces, highlighting how hardware impairments limit performance despite the potential for enhanced security.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analytical framework for evaluating security in FAS-RIS NOMA systems under hardware impairments, revealing fundamental performance limits.

Findings

Hardware impairments impose performance ceilings.

Synergy between FAs and intelligent surfaces enhances security.

Hardware quality critically affects system security performance.

Abstract

The revolutionary convergence of fluid antenna systems (FAS) and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) creates unprecedented opportunities for secure wireless communications, yet the practical implications of hardware impairments on this promising combination remain largely unexplored. This paper investigates the security performance of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems when fluid antennas (FAs) meet intelligent surfaces under realistic hardware constraints. We develop a comprehensive analytical framework that captures the complex interplay between adaptive spatial diversity, intelligent signal reflection, and hardware-induced distortions in short-packet communications. Through novel piecewise linear approximations and block-correlation models, we derive tractable expressions for average secure block error rate (BLER) that reveal fundamental performance limits imposed by hardware impairments. Our analysis demonstrates that while the synergy between FAs and intelligent surfaces offers remarkable degrees of freedom for security enhancement, practical hardware imperfections create performance ceilings that persist regardless of spatial diversity gains. The theoretical framework exposes critical design trade-offs between system complexity and achievable security performance, showing that hardware quality becomes a decisive factor in realizing the full potential of FAS-RIS architectures. Extensive simulations validate our analytical insights and provide practical design guidelines for implementing secure NOMA systems that effectively balance the benefits of fluid-intelligent cooperation against the constraints of realistic hardware limitations.