Wireless-powered cooperative MIMO NOMA networks: Design and performance improvement for cell-edge users

Abstract

In this paper, we study two transmission scenarios for the base station (BS) in cellular networks to serve the far user, who is located at the cell-edge area in such a network. In particular, we show that wireless-powered non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and the cell-center user in such a model can harvest energy from the BS. To overcome disadvantages of the cell-edge user due to its weak received signal, we fabricate a far NOMA user with multiple antennas to achieve performance improvement. In addition, the first scenario only considers a relay link deployed to forward signals to a far NOMA user, while both direct links and relay links are generally enabled to serve a far user in the second scenario. These situations, together with their outage performance, are analyzed and compared to provide insights in the design of a real-multiple-antenna NOMA network, in which the BS is also required to equip multiple antennas for robust quality of transmission. Higher complexity in computations is already known in consideration of outage metrics with respect to performance analysis, since the system model employs multiple antennas. To this end, we employ a transmit antenna selection (TAS) policy to formulate closed-form expressions of outage probability that satisfies the quality-of-service (QoS) requirements in the NOMA network. Our simulation results reveal that the performance of the considered system will be improved in cases of higher quantity of transmit antennas in dedicated devices. Finally, the proposed design in such a NOMA system cannot only ensure a downlink with higher quality to serve a far NOMA user, but also provide significant system performance improvement compared to a traditional NOMA networks using a single antenna.