Impartial SWIPT-Assisted User Cooperation Schemes

In this paper, an impartial simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT)-assisted cooperation mechanism is proposed for a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) downlink scenario. The key idea of the proposed impartial user cooperation mechanism (IUCM) is that not only the cell-center user but also the cell-edge user applies the power-splitting architecture and utilizes the harvested energy to forward the other user's information. Analytical results show that the proposed IUCM outperforms the traditional partial cooperation mechanism in terms of outage probability, diversity order and diversity-multiplexing trade-off (DMT). For comparison, the proposed IUCM is further incorporated into an orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) framework, which is shown to preserve the same diversity order, while has a worse but more flexible DMT performance compared with the IUCM in the NOMA framework. Furthermore, a classic non-linear energy harvesting model is introduced, based on which the outage probability, diversity order and DMT performance of the proposed IUCM and the conventional mechanism are analyzed. Finally, representative numerical results are given to validate our theoretical analysis.