Outage Performance of RIS-aided Cooperative FD-SWIPT-NOMA in Nakagami-m Channels

In this work we {derive new} analytical expressions for the outage probability (OP) of the downlink (DL) cooperative full-duplex (FD) simultaneous wireless information power transfer (SWIPT) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system aided by reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS). The expressions for both the strongest and weakest NOMA users are devised assuming Nakagami-$m$ channel fading. The derived analytical OP expressions are simple to compute yet accurate for a wide range of RIS passive elements configurations, energy harvesting (EH) coefficient, and residual self-interference (SI) levels, being extensively validated by numerical simulations, demonstrating the correctness and accuracy of the proposed analytical method. The OP expressions reveal how paramount is to mitigate the SI in the FD relay mode, since for reasonable values of residual SI coefficient ($\bar{\omega}\geq -13$dB), it is notable its detrimental effect over the system performance; hence, new SI reduction methods for FD relays are useful for low number of passive elements. Also, applying the proposed OP expressions to predict the behaviour of the RIS-NOMA system equipped with a higher number of passive elements ($N\geq 30$) reveals a substantial reduction of the SI effect, motivating the implementation of the cooperative FD communications. Furthermore, we found the asymptotic behavior of outage probability of both clustered users, as well as the equal diversity order for both users, given by $\frac{N\mu^2}{2-2\mu^2}$ if the fraction of the harvest energy $\rho =0$ or $0$ if $\rho\neq0$, indicating the influence of channel parameters and number of RIS elements in the performance.Comment: 23 pages, 8 figures, full pape