Enhanced Integrated Satellite-Terrestrial NOMA with Cooperative Device-to-Device Communication

The currently deployed terrestrial wireless networks experience difficulties while coping with the massive connectivity demands of coexisting users and devices. The addition of satellite segments has been proposed as a viable way of providing improved coverage and capacity, leading to the formation of integrated satellite-terrestrial networks. In such topologies, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) can further enhance the efficient use of wireless resources by simultaneously serving multiple users. In this paper, an integrated satellite-terrestrial NOMA network is studied where cooperation between ground users is allowed, following the device-to-device (D2D) paradigm. More specifically, the proposed satellite NOMA cooperative (SANOCO) D2D scheme optimally selects pairs of users, by considering the channel conditions of the satellite and the terrestrial D2D links. In SANOCO-D2D users are served through NOMA in the satellite link, and then, if the weak user fails to decode its signal, terrestrial D2D communication is activated to maintain the total sum rate of the system. Comparisons with conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA) and an alternative NOMA optimal user pairing scheme show that significant sum rate and spectral efficiency gains can be harvested through SANOCO-D2D under varying channel conditions and terrestrial D2D bandwidth.