Sum Rate and Outage Performance of Relay-Aided NOMA Over Power Line Communication

We present a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based coooperative scheme for relay-assisted power line communication (PLC) systems. The network consists of a source (S) modem, a decode-and-forward relay (R) modem and a destination (D) modem. In the first time slot, S communicates to both R and D using NOMA, while S and R simultaneously communicate with D in the second time slot. We derive closed form expressions for the approximate average sum rate and overall outage probability of the network. Through Monte Carlo simulations and numerical techniques we show that the approximations used in our analysis are tight. Furthermore, we show that our scheme outperforms a single-stage cooperative relaying NOMA scheme for PLC proposed in the earlier literature, in terms of outage probability and sum rate.