Backscatter-Based Cooperative NOMA

A backscatter cooperation (BC) mechanism is pro-posed for power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) downlink transmission. The key idea is to enable one user to split and then backscatter part of its received signals to improve the reception at another user. To evaluate its performance, three benchmark schemes are introduced. They are non-cooperation (NC)-NOMA, conventional relaying (CR)-NOMA, and incremental relaying (IR)-NOMA. For all these schemes, the analytical expressions of the minimum total power to avoid information outage are derived, based on which their respective outage performance, expected rates, and diversity-multiplexing trade-off (DMT) are investigated. Analytical results show that the proposed BC-NOMA strictly outperforms NC-NOMA in terms of all the three metrics. Furthermore, theoretical analyses are validated via Monte-Carlo simulations. It is shown that compared with CR/IR-NOMA, only the proposed BC-NOMA scheme can enhance the transmission reliability without impairing the transmission rate.