Adaptive Multiuser Cooperative NOMA Scheme With Energy Buffer-Aided Near-Users for High Spectral and Energy Efficiency

In this article, a multiuser cooperative nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) network is considered. In order to improve their battery lifetime, the near-user (NU) Internet of Things (IoT) nodes relay information to the far-user (FU) IoT nodes using only the energy harvested from the ambience. The harvested energy at all the NU IoT nodes is stored in energy buffers. To improve the throughput performance, the best NU and best FU (BNBF) user selection scheme is employed. Moreover, unlike conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA) networks, an adaptive NOMA network is considered in this article that switches between direct NOMA, NOMA with relaying, and OMA modes to maximize throughput. To improve accuracy and reduce the computational complexity, the energy buffer states at the NU IoT nodes are modeled using a continuous state-space Markov chain (CSMC) instead of discrete state-space Markov chain (DSMC). We derive the limiting distributions of the stored energy in energy buffers with either the best effort policy (BEP) or the on–off policy (OOP) applied for buffer energy management. Expressions for throughput are derived for both harvest-store-use (HSU) and harvest-use (HU) architectures. The Monte Carlo simulations are used to validate the derived analytical expressions.