Outage and Throughput Analysis of UAV-Assisted NOMA Relay Systems With Indoor and Outdoor Users

Abstract

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) are two promising technologies for the fifth generation (5G) and beyond networks. On the other hand, the transition environment from outdoor to indoor is an important problem in practical wireless communication. In this paper, we mathematically study a multi-antenna UAV-assisted communication system where a multi-antenna base station (BS) communicates with indoor and outdoor users through a multiantenna UAV using the power-domain NOMA technique. The metric used to evaluate the system performance are outage probability (OP) and throughput of indoor and outdoor users under different communication urban environments. Moreover, the impacts of the UAV's altitude and location and the light-of-sight (LoS) probability on system performance are also considered. We give the exact and asymptotic closed-form OP expressions and then optimize the transmission rate to maximize the throughput of each user and the overall system throughput. Numerical results show that better system performance can be achieved by controlling the altitudes and location of the UAV, selecting an appropriate transmission rate, or equipping BS and UAV with more antennas. Monte-Carlo simulation results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the investigated system and the accuracy of the developed analytical results.