Sum Rate Analysis of Cooperative NOMA Over Dual-Hop Wireless-Power Line Communication

In this paper, we study the sum rate performance of cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) over a dual-hop wireless-power line communication (PLC) system. The setup consists of four nodes namely a source, a relay and two destination nodes which are served by the relay using NOMA. The relay is assumed to be a decode-and-forward relay, the wireless link to be Nakagami-m distributed and that the PLC link undergoes lognormal fading with impulsive noise. We derive the mathematical expressions for rates on the wireless and PLC links, along with the sum rate. Further, we formulate a sum rate maximization problem to find the optimal power allocation at the relay. Through numerical techniques and Monte Carlo simulations, we validate our analysis and show that the proposed NOMA setup performs better than a corresponding orthogonal multiple access setup and an existing technique that does not use multiple access.