User Grouping and Energy Harvesting in UAV-NOMA System With AF/DF Relaying

The development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is one of the driving forces for revolutionizing wireless communications in the modern era. Although there are many unique features of UAV networks, their widespread use is still hampered by the short battery life. As a result, most of the research efforts in this domain mainly have focused on the efficient use of energy through trajectory planning and cooperative communication. While there have been a few proposals to use energy harvesting techniques for UAV networks, a complete understanding of the performance limits of such networks is still missing in the literature and needs further investigations. Within this context, our paper provides a comprehensive performance evaluation of UAV relay networks (UAVRNs) employing non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique. Specifically, a cooperative communication system, where a UAV serves as a mobile relay, is fully considered. The UAV relay is considered to be wirelessly-powered and harvests energy from the radio signals received from a nearby base station. For the sake of comparison, both amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) relaying protocols are considered. Subsequently, the closed-form expressions of outage probabilities and ergodic capacities are provided for each UAV relaying protocol. Extensive simulations are performed to verify the accuracy of the derived closed-form expressions. The results provided in this work characterize the outage and ergodic capacity performance of NOMA-enabled UAVRNs.