On the impact of IQI on cooperative NOMA with direct links in the presence of imperfect CSI

Cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (CNOMA) is considered as a promising technique to improve network coverage, reliability and transmission for future wireless communication networks. Meanwhile, transceivers can suffer from a number of hardware imperfections that will significantly reduce their performance, such as phase noise and in-phase/quadrature-phase imbalance (IQI). In this paper, we investigate the effect of in-phase and quadrature-phase imbalance (IQI) on CNOMA with direct links in the presence of imperfect channel state information (ICSI). The outage probability (OP) and throughput expressions are derived to evaluate the performance behaviors of the CNOMA with direct links under the IQI and ICSI imperfections. Theoretical analyzes are verified by Monte Carlo simulation. The effect of the IQI on the CNOMA with the direct links has been studied with different parameters (image rejection ratio (IRR), power allocation) and compared with conventional NOMA to clearly observe the degrading effects of imperfections on the systems. The simulation results demonstrate that the IQI and ICSI have a negative impact on the outage and throughput performance.