Performance of User-Assisted Nonlinear Energy Harvesting NOMA Network with Alamouti/MRC

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the outage performance of a dual-hop NOMA system using Alamouti coding and MRC, incorporating nonlinear energy harvesting and direct links, with analytical and simulation validation.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive system model with closed-form outage probability expressions for NOMA with Alamouti coding and nonlinear energy harvesting.

Findings

Direct link improves far user's performance significantly.

Nonlinear energy harvesting affects outage probability.

Analytical results match Monte Carlo simulations.

Abstract

This paper focuses on evaluating the outage performance of a dual-hop single-phase non-orthogonal multiple-access (NOMA) system. The base station employs the Alamouti space-time block coding technique (Alamouti-STBC), enabling simultaneous communication with two mobile users, and the far user employs a maximal ratio combining (MRC) scheme. In this setup, the near user serves as a full-duplex (FD) (or half-duplex (HD)) energy harvesting (EH) relay, adopting decode-and-forward (DF) protocol for the far user. The study involves the development of a system model and the closed-form equations of exact and asymptotic outage probabilities (OP) over Nakagami-m fading channels with and without direct link considering a threshold-based nonlinear EH relaying model. We verify analytical results by Monte Carlo simulations and show that the presence of a direct link in the system enhances the performance of the far user considerably by mitigating the degradation caused by the self-interference in the near user.