Performance Comparison Between NOMA and OMA Relaying Protocols in Multi-Hop Networks over Nakagami-m Fading Channels under Impact of Hardware Impairments

In this paper, we evaluate and compare performance of multi-hop relaying (MR) protocols under impact of hardware impairments, in terms of outage probability (OP) and throughput (TP). By applying non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique at each hop, the end-to-end data rate/throughput of the MR protocol can be enhanced, as compared with the conventional one. Particularly, the transmitter at each hop combines two signals, and forwards the combined signal to the receiver which uses successive interference cancelation (SIC) to extract the data. For performance evaluation and comparison, we derive exact closed-form expressions of OP and TP for the considered protocols over Nakagami-m channel. Monte Carlo simulations are then performed to verify the theoretical derivations.