On the Performance of NOMA-Based Cooperative Relaying Systems Over Rician Fading Channels

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a promising technique for the fifth generation (5G) wireless communications. As users with good channel conditions can serve as relays to enhance the system performance by using successive interference cancellation (SIC), the integration of NOMA and cooperative relaying has recently attracted increasing interests. In this paper, a NOMA-based cooperative relaying system is studied, and an analytical framework is developed to evaluate its performance. Specifically, the performance of NOMA over Rician fading channels is studied, and the exact expression of the average achievable rate is derived. Moreover, we also propose an approximation method to calculate the achievable rate by using the Gauss–Chebyshev Integration. Numerical results confirm that our derived analytical results match well with the Monte Carlo simulations.