Performance of Cooperative NOMA with Virtual Full-Duplex based DF Relaying in Nakagami-m Fading

Spectrally-efficient full-duplex (FD) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) communications is a promising technology for future wireless communications that superimposes users in the power domain and allows them to simultaneously transmit and receive information from the base station (BS). However, self-interference cancellation in FD is still a major challenge, and thus the concept of virtual full duplex relaying (VFD) has evolved. In this work, without loss of generality, we consider a decode-and-forward (DF) relaying based NOMA transmission with a BS, two near users, and a far user constituting VFD over Nakagami-m fading channels. Framework for the exact and asymptotic outage probability (OP) and ergodic rate (ER) expressions is developed for the considered system model. Further, the impact of fading parameters, along with pathloss, is analyzed for the first time. Accuracy of the derived expressions is verified through rigorous simulations.