Capacity and outage analysis of a dual-hop decode-and-forward relay-aided NOMA scheme

Abstract Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is regarded as a candidate radio access technique for the next generation wireless networks because of its manifold spectral gains. A two-phase cooperative relaying strategy (CRS) is proposed in this paper by exploiting the concept of both downlink and uplink NOMA (termed as DU-CNOMA). In the proposed protocol, a transmitter considered as a source transmits a NOMA composite signal consisting of two symbols to the destination and relay during the first phase, following the principle of downlink NOMA. In the second phase, the relay forwards the symbol decoded by successive interference cancellation to the destination, whereas the source transmits a new symbol to the destination in parallel with the relay, following the principle of uplink NOMA. The ergodic sum capacity, outage probability, outage sum capacity, and energy efficiency are investigated comprehensively along with analytical derivations, under both perfect and imperfect successive interference cancellation. To inquire more insight into the system outage performance, diversity order for each symbol in the proposed DU-NOMA is also demonstrated. The performance improvement of the proposed DU-CNOMA over the conventional CRS using NOMA is proved through analysis and computer simulation. Furthermore, the correctness of the author's analysis is proved through a strong agreement between simulation and analytical results.