SWIPT Cooperative Protocol for Improving the Communication Quality of Cell-Edge Users in NOMA Network and Its Performance Analysis

Abstract

To solve the problems of complex energy supply and poor communication effect of cell-edge users, combining the advantages of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) and collaborative non-orthogonal multiple access (CNOMA), two novel protocols are proposed. By employing the PS and TS strategies in SWIPT, respectively, two protocols are named: SWIPT-CNOMA-PS and SWIPT-CNOMA-TS. Based on the protocols, a new method for selecting relays is first established by considering two factors—energy state and channel condition. To further improve energy efficiency, the relay harvests the energy of the signal sent by the source and stores it. We establish a one-dimensional Markov chain with the energy state as the system state to analyze the variation of the relay energy. Exploiting the conservation equation, the probability of energy sufficiency of the node and outage probabilities of users are derived. Finally, the impact of the energy threshold and the number of relays on the outage probability of users is revealed. The protocol in this paper shows better performance than the OMA protocol when the transmit signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is less than 14 dB and the protocol in the literature when the transmit SNR is less than 11 dB.