Cooperative Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access in 5G Systems

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has recently received considerable attention as a promising candidate for 5G systems. A key feature of NOMA is that users with better channel conditions have prior information about the messages of the other users. This prior knowledge is fully exploited in this paper, where a cooperative NOMA scheme is proposed. Outage probability and diversity order achieved by this cooperative NOMA scheme are analyzed, and an approach based on user pairing is also proposed to reduce system complexity in practice.