Abstract
The combination of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and cooperative communications can be a suitable solution for fifth generation (5G) and beyond 5G (B5G) wireless systems with massive connectivity, because it can provide higher spectral efficiency, lower energy consumption, and improved fairness compared to the non-cooperative NOMA. However, the receiver complexity in the conventional cooperative NOMA increases with increasing number of users owing to successive interference cancellation (SIC) at each user. Space time block code-aided cooperative NOMA (STBC-CNOMA) offers less numbers of SIC as compared to that of conventional cooperative NOMA. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of STBC-CNOMA under practical challenges such as imperfect SIC, imperfect timing synchronization between distributed cooperating users, and imperfect channel state information (CSI). We derive closed-form expressions of the received signals in the presence of such realistic impairments and then use them to evaluate outage probability. Further, we provide intuitive insights into the impact of each impairment on the outage performance through asymptotic analysis at high transmit signal-to-noise ratio. We also compare the complexity of STBC-CNOMA with existing cooperative NOMA protocols for a given number of users. In addition, through analysis and simulation, we observe that the impact of the imperfect SIC on the outage performance of STBC-CNOMA is more significant compared to the other two imperfections. Therefore, considering the smaller number of SIC in STBC-CNOMA compared to the other cooperative NOMA protocols, STBC-CNOMA is an effective solution to achieve high reliability for the same SIC imperfection condition.