Outage Analysis of EH-based Cooperative NOMA Networks over Generalized Statistical Models

In this paper, the outage probability (OP) of the two-hop cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access network with an energy-constrained cooperative agent is evaluated over generalized α-µ and κ-µ fading models. The power splitting relaying protocol is implemented at the cooperative agent, acting as a relay in amplify-and-forward mode. The effect of hardware impairments (HIs) at the radio frequency front-ends of transceivers are incorporated during the performance evaluation. The results based on the derived analytical expressions suggest the importance of considering HIs for given network architecture and allow one to evaluate the OP over various statistical models.