Capacity Analysis of an AF Relay Cooperative NOMA System Using MRC

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is widely studied in both academia and industry due to its high spectral efficiency over orthogonal multiple access (OMA). To effectively improve spectrum efficiency, an amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative NOMA system is proposed as well as a novel detection scheme is proposed, in which we first perform successive interference cancellation (SIC) twice at U1 for the two signals received from two time slots to remove interference from symbol 2, then two new signals apply max ratio combining (MRC). In addition, a closed-form upper bound approximation for the ergodic capacity of our proposed system is derived. Monte-Carlo simulations and numerical analysis illustrate that our proposed system has better ergodic capacity performance than the conventional cooperative NOMA system with decode-forward (DF) relay, the conventional cooperative NOMA system with AF relay and the proposed AF cooperative NOMA system in [16]. In addition, we can see that ergodic capacity of all NOMA cooperative systems increase with the increase of transmit SNR. Finally, simulations display that power allocation coefficients have little effect on ergodic capacity of all NOMA cooperative systems. This is due to this fact that ergodic capacity of two symbols can be complementary with changing of power allocation coefficients.