Uplink and downlink NOMA transmission using full-duplex UAV

Abstract

In this article, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-aided non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) network along with uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) transmissions is investigated. A group of sources intend to communicate with a group of destinations over Nakagami-m fading channels. Decode-and-Forward (DF) protocol is adopted at the relay (UAV plays the role of relay) while successive interference cancellation (SIC) is required at destinations (receivers) for signal detection, e.g., imperfect SIC (ipSIC) and perfect SIC (pSIC) are studied. The UAV relay benefits from the modes of full-duplex/half-duplex (FD/HD). We then derive analytical expressions of outage probability as main metric. Simulations are conducted to valid the analytical expressions. Moreover, the levels of the effectiveness of the FD mode and pSIC case are demonstrated through analysis and simulation and then compared with those of their counterparts. Numerical results are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed UAV-aided NOMA transmission strategies.