UAV aided NOMA relaying with energy harvesting architecture: Performance analysis

In this work, we consider a dual hop Non Orthogonal Miltiple Access (NOMA) based communication network between Source $S$ and two destination users $U_A$ , $U_B$ which is aided by an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) relay $R$. The energy constrained UAV relay harvests energy from signal transmitted by the source through Power Splitting (PS) and further transmits the signal using Amplify and Forward (AF) protocol to the destination users through NOMA. For the proposed network, we derive analytical expressions for outage probability and ergodic capacity. The impact of parameters like PS ratio and UAV altitude is studied on the overall system performance. Further, the performance of the proposed system is also compared with Orthogonal Multiple Access (OMA) scheme. The results obtained show that the energy harvesting capacity of UAV is significantly affected under Linear and Non Linear EH models. The numerical analysis done is verified through Monte Carlo Simulations.