Improved User Fairness in Decode-Forward Relaying Non-orthogonal Multiple Access Schemes with Imperfect SIC

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is one of the key technologies to serve in ultra-dense networks with massive connections which is crucial for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Besides, NOMA provides better spectral efficiency compared to orthogonal multiple access (OMA) schemes. However, in NOMA, successive interference canceler (SIC) should be implemented for interference mitigation and mostly in the literature, perfect SIC is assumed for NOMA involved systems. Unfortunately, this is not the case for practical scenarios and this imperfect SIC effect limits the performance of NOMA involved systems. In addition, it causes unfairness between users. In this paper, we introduce reversed decode-forward relaying NOMA (R-DFNOMA) to improve user fairness compared to conventional DFNOMA (C-DFNOMA) which is widely analyzed in literature. In the analysis, we define imperfect SIC effect dependant to channel fading and with this imperfect SIC, we derive exact expressions for ergodic capacity (EC) and outage probability (OP). Moreover, we evaluate bit error performance of proposed R-DFNOMA and derive bit error probability (BEP) in closed-form which has not been also studied well in literature. Then, we define user fairness index in terms of all key performance indicators (KPIs) (i.e., EC, OP and BEP). Based on extensive simulations, all derived expressions are validated, and it is proved that proposed R-DFNOMA provides better user fairness than C-DFNOMA in terms of all KPIs. Finally, we discuss the effect of power allocations at the both source and relay on the performance metrics and user fairness