Non-orthogonal multiple access in cooperative UAV networks: A stochastic geometry model

Abstract

In this paper, a unified framework for 3-hop unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) network is proposed. Aim at characterizing the performance of proposed framework, by using stochastic geometry, the analytical expressions for the outage probability of uplink/downlink transmissions are derived in closed- form for randomly deployed NOMA users. To obtain more insights of the network performance, the asymptotic analyses for the outage probability in the high signal- to-noise ratio (SNR) regime are carried out. These results reveal that for the uplink transmission, there exists an error floor due to the interference from the far user, while the performance of the far user can outperform the near one for the downlink transmission, which can be explained by the fact that the far user has a higher receiving power.