Buffer-Aided Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access Relaying Systems in Rayleigh Fading Channels

Abstract

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a promising technology in future communication systems. In this paper, we propose a buffer-aided NOMA relaying system, which consists of a source, a relay, and two destinations. In the relaying system, the relay helps the source transmit packets to two destinations simultaneously using NOMA scheme. We theoretically derive outage probabilities of source-to-relay link and relay-to-destinations links considering two scenarios that the relay does and does not know the channel state information (CSI) from itself to two destinations. When the relay knows CSI, the obtained outage probability of relay-to-destinations links involves integration operation. Thus, we derive an upper bound and two lower bounds. Simulation results demonstrate that two lower bounds approach exact outage probability at low and high signal-to-noise ratios, respectively. We also propose a relay decision scheme for the buffer-aided NOMA relaying system. Based on the obtained system outage probability, we theoretically derive the diversity order. It is found that no matter whether the relay knows CSI or not, the diversity order of 2 can be achieved when the buffer size is larger than or equal to 3.