Backscatter Cooperation in NOMA Communications Systems

In this paper, a backscatter cooperation (BC) scheme is proposed for non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) downlink transmission. The key idea is to backscatter the surplus power of the received downlink signals at one user to enhance the reception of the user who cannot recover its information. To evaluate the performance of the proposed BC-NOMA scheme, three benchmark schemes are introduced, which include the non-cooperation (NC)-NOMA scheme, the conventional relaying (CR)-NOMA scheme, and the incremental relaying (IR)-NOMA scheme. For all these schemes, the outage performance, the expected rate, and the diversity-multiplexing trade-off (DMT) performance are analyzed. Additionally, the optimal power allocation to maximize the expected rate of the BC-NOMA scheme in the high signal-to-noise ratio region is derived. The theoretical results show that the proposed BC-NOMA can enhance both transmission reliability (outage performance) and transmission effectiveness (expected rate) compared with NC-NOMA. Furthermore, representative numerical results are presented to validate the theoretical results. It is shown that unlike the two relaying-based cooperative schemes (CR/IR-NOMA), which improve the outage performance at the cost of transmission rate, the proposed BC-NOMA scheme can enhance the transmission reliability without impairing the spectrum efficiency, which makes backscattering an appealing solution to cooperative NOMA downlinks.