A unified performance analysis of cooperative NOMA with practical constraints: hardware impairment, imperfect SIC and CSI

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been a strong candidate to support massive connectivity in future wireless networks. In this regard, its implementation into cooperative relaying, named cooperative-NOMA (CNOMA), has received tremendous attention from researchers. However, most of the existing CNOMA studies have failed to address practical constraints since they assume ideal conditions. Particularly, the error performance of CNOMA schemes with imperfections has not been investigated yet. In this paper, we provide an analytical framework for error and outage performance of CNOMA schemes under practical assumptions where we take into account imperfect successive interference canceler (ipSIC), imperfect channel state information (ipCSI), and hardware impairments (HWI) at the transceivers. We derive analytical expressions of bit error rate (BER) expressions in CNOMA schemes whether the direct links between source and users exist or not which is, to the best of the authors' knowledge, the first study in the open literature. We also derive the outage probability (OP) expressions for CNOMA schemes with and without direct links under practical assumptions. For comparisons, we provide BER and OP expressions for downlink NOMA with practical constraints which also have not been given in the literature, yet. The theoretical BER and OP expressions are validated with computer simulations where the perfect match is observed. Finally, we discuss the effects of the system parameters (e.g., power allocation, HWI level, ipCSI factor) on the performance of CNOMA schemes to reveal fruitful insights for society. The results demonstrate that the HWI, ipCSI and ipSIC have a significant effect on the performance of the systems