Performance Analysis of a Hybrid Downlink-Uplink Cooperative NOMA Scheme

This paper proposes a novel hybrid downlinkuplink cooperative NOMA (HDU-CNOMA) scheme to achieve a better tradeoff between spectral efficiency and signal reception reliability than the conventional cooperative NOMA schemes. In particular, the proposed scheme enables the strong user to perform a cooperative transmission and an interference-free uplink transmission simultaneously during the cooperative phase, at the expense of a slightly decrease in signal reception reliability at the weak user. We analyze the outage probability, diversity order, and outage throughput of the proposed scheme. Simulation results not only confirm the accuracy of the developed analytical results, but also unveil the spectral efficiency gains achieved by the proposed scheme over a baseline cooperative NOMA scheme and a non-cooperative NOMA scheme.