Outage Probability and Throughput Analysis of TAS/SC Assisted Multihop DF Schemes Using PD-NOMA

Abstract

This paper proposes a joint transmit antenna selection (TAS) and selection combining (SC)-assisted multi-hop decode-and-forward (DF) scheme employing power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (PD-NOMA). In the proposed protocol, a source transmits its data to a destination via a preestablished multi-hop route. TAS/SC is applied at each hop to enhance transmission reliability. Meanwhile, PD-NOMA is utilized to simultaneously transmit the source data and the data of an additional node that is not part of the source-destination route. We evaluate the end-to-end (e2e) outage probability (OPe2e) and system throughput (TP-e2e) of the proposed scheme through both analytical derivations and simulations over Rayleigh fading channels. The results show that the proposed scheme achieves the same diversity gain as the conventional TAS/SC-assisted multi-hop DF scheme without PD-NOMA. In addition, at high transmit signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regions, the proposed scheme provides a significantly higher multiplexing gain.