Full-duplex cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access with beamforming and energy harvesting

Abstract

In this paper, a novel communication scheme that combines beamforming, energy harvesting, and cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system is introduced. In the proposed scheme, NOMA is first combined with beamforming to serve more than one user in each beamforming vector. Later, simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) technique is exploited to encourage the strong user to relay the weak user's information messages in full-duplex (FD) manner. However, one major drawback of FD communications is the self-interference (SI) signal due to signal leakage from terminal's output to the input. Three different cases are adopted. In the first case, the SI signal is assumed to be fully cancelled at the strong user using SI cancellation techniques. In the second case, SI is only cancelled at the information decoding circuits, while being harvested in the energy harvester to provide extra energy. The third case investigates the impact of imperfect SI cancellation on system performance is investigated. It is proved that introducing SWIPT doesn't only motivate users to collaborate, but also mitigates the impact of the SI signal. In addition, the problem of total sum rate maximisation is formulated and solved locally by means of two-step difference of convex functions (DC)-based procedure. Furthermore, the outage probability of both weak and strong user is derived and provided in closed-form expressions. Numerical simulations are presented to illustrate the sum rate gain of the proposed scheme if compared with existing schemes, and to verify the derived formulas.