Performance of a Multiuser Cooperative IoT NOMA Network with Battery-Assisted Energy Harvesting

This paper investigates a cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (Co-NM) based network consisting of a multiantenna source, a full-duplex energy harvesting (EH) near user (NU) internet-of-things (IoT) node and multiple distant user (DU) IoT nodes. The source shares a direct link to the NU, while the NU augments the harvested energy by a limited amount of its battery energy to relay the information to the selected DU. Considering time-switching (TS) or power-splitting (PS) protocol, practical nonlinear EH, successive interference cancellation error, and opportunistic Co-NM/OMA (OM) switching, closed-form expressions are derived for the outage probability and throughput of both DU and NU. We demonstrate that the proposed opportunistic Co-NM/OM switching can ensure a performance similar to OM at the NU without loss in DU throughput. Also, a joint optimal choice of battery energy and PS/TS parameter helps in attaining a maximum energy efficiency (EE). Moreover, Co-NM/OM switching ensures higher EE compared to Co-NM and OM.