Outage Performance Analysis for User Cooperative NOMA with Incremental Hybrid Forwarding Protocols

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) collaborative communication is extremely beneficial to the users with poor channel conditions. It is essential to examine the performance of different NOMA users with superior cooperative forwarding protocols. This paper addresses the user cooperative NOMA system where one strong user (U2) assists one weak user (U1) to forward messages, and investigates the outage performance of both users with hybrid decode-and-amplify forwarding (HDAF) protocol. First, we derive the outage probability of U2 and U1 with HDAF. Secondly, we provide the closed-form expression for outage probability of U1 with the incremental hybrid decode-and-amplify forward (IHDAF) protocol at U2, which can further enhance the outage performance of U1 compared with HDAF. Moreover, we also present the system throughput expression and provide deep analysis on the effect of different forwarding protocols. Numerical results and Monte Carlo simulations jointly confirm the correctness of all the analytic derivations. In addition to saving the energy consumption of U2, IHDAF can make U1 achieve superior outage performance to HDAF. However, the system throughput almost overlap for both schemes given a threshold rate pair.