Exploiting cooperative diversity with non-orthogonal multiple access over slow fading channel

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has attracted a significant attention to the research community as a potential candidate for 5G or future radio access. This article presents a NOMA-based cooperative network where a transmitter considered as a base station communicates simultaneously with two users treating as a far user and a near user via the help of a half-duplex decode-and-forward relay. We investigate the outage probability and the outage capacity of the proposed network over independent Rayleigh slow fading channels. Closed-form expressions of the outage probabilities are derived for both users. Approximate outage capacity of the users are also investigated at high signal to noise ratio regime. It has been shown that the proposed cooperative NOMA can achieve superior performance compared to the non-cooperative NOMA in terms of outage probability. The tightness between the simulation and theoretical results confirms the efficiency of the proposed protocol.