On outage probability and ergodic rate of downlink multi-user relay systems with combination of noma, swipt, and beamforming

A downlink of multi-user non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) relay systems is considered. To improve system performance, relay nodes are used to forward signals from the base station (BS) to the end users, and they are wirelessly powered by energy harvesting from the radio frequency transmitted from the BS. Moreover, beamforming is applied at the BS based on multiple antennas and relay nodes consist of one transmit antenna but several receive ones. The system performance is demonstrated through closed-form expressions of outage probability (OP) and ergodic rate (ER) over Rayleigh fading channels. The proposed system is investigated in two cases of perfect and imperfect successive interference cancellation (SIC), and the imperfect channel state information condition is also taken into consideration. The OP and ER are calculated in many scenarios and the optimal time fraction of energy harvesting corresponding to the minimum OP is discussed. The exact and approximate theoretical results are compared with the simulation result to confirm the proposed theoretical analysis method. © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.