Enabling unmanned aerial vehicle to serve ground users in downlink NOMA system

Abstract

The emergence of internet-of-things (IoT) devices in homes and industry, has resulted in the current and future generation of wireless communications facing unique challenges in spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, and massive connectivity issues. Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been proposed as a viable solution to address these challenges as it offers low-latency, spectral efficiency, and massive connectivity capabilities, which are key requirements in upcoming next-generation networks. In addition, another technology that has emerged as a solution to spectral efficiency and coverage is an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Therefore, the combination of UAVs with NOMA has great potential to minimize the challenges and maximize the benefits. Specifically, we investigate the outage performance of the NOMA-UAV network over Nakagami-m channel fading. To this end, we derive a closed-form outage performance metric. The formulated framework is validated using simulations to verify the effectiveness of the proposed solution.