Performance Analysis of Cooperative Aerial Base Station-Assisted Networks With Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access

The use of aerial base stations (ABSs) is gaining attention due to its potentials to provide a flexible wireless coverage in adverse scenarios. Investigations on key performance metrics are desirable to ensure the feasibility of these ABS-assisted networks, especially when they are jointly designed with advanced transmission technologies, e.g., cooperative transmissions and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). In this paper, we consider an ABS-assisted cooperative system with NOMA enabled to boost connectivity ability. It is assumed that multiple ABSs hover around a macro base station to relay downlink signals to user equipments, while interfering nodes are randomly distributed on the ground. We assume a more realistic channel model featured with a distance-related probabilistic line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight propagation, as well as non-identical small-scale fading. We derive the outage probability, and study the impacts of various parameters on the system performance. Numerical results unveil that: 1) The reliability of backhauls plays an important role in the system and determines the outage performance floor. 2) Joint transmissions from the sky can bring in a significant performance enhancement for the system. 3) The NOMA based transmission outperforms the traditional orthogonal multiple access with an improved outage performance, provided a properly selected NOMA power allocation coefficient.