Exploiting Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access in Cooperative Relay Sharing

We propose and investigate a dual-hop cooperative relaying scheme using non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) (termed NOMA-RS), where two sources communicate with their corresponding destinations in parallel over the same frequency band via a common relay. In this scheme, after receiving symbols transmitted in parallel by both sources with different allocated powers, the relay forwards a super-position coded composite signal using NOMA to the destinations. One of the main benefits of NOMA-RS is that multiple (two) sources can share the same relay, unlike the previous works. Through the simulations and mathematical analysis, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed protocol in terms of ergodic sum capacity by considering perfect and imperfect successive interference cancellation.