New NOMA-Based Two-Way Relay Networks

Relays have been deployed to provide connectivity to heavily blocked and isolated radio environments, but suffer from severe data rate losses due to the half-duplex nature of relays. This paper exploits non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) to enhance the sum-rate of two heavily blocked users to and from a base station (BS) via two-way relays (TWRs). By carefully arranging the NOMA transmissions, only two time slots are needed to complete a round of two-way transmissions between the BS and the two users. Unlike existing works where users associated with the same relay form a NOMA pair, the two users are connected to two different relays in the proposed scheme, due to the blockage. We analyze the sum-rate of the proposed NOMA-based TWR scheme with two popular relaying modes, namely, amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) relaying, and derive closed-form expressions for the sum-rate upper bounds of the scheme. We also analyze the asymptotic sum-rate of the NOMA-based TWR schemes in high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regions. Simulations verify the analysis, and show that the proposed schemes outperform existing TDMA-based alternatives and a NOMA-based benchmark scheme. It is shown that the sum-rate of the schemes is independent of the transmit power of the BS in the high SNR regions, given the transmit powers of the relays and users.