Performance of NOMA-Based Dual-Hop Hybrid Powerline-Wireless Communication Systems

Abstract

The mixture of wireless and power line communications (PLC) is vital for implementing new applications in smart grid and vehicular communications. In this work, we investigate the performance of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) based dual-hop hybrid communication systems with decode-and-forward relay. The wireless channel is characterized by Nakagami- m fading under an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), while the PLC channels are characterized by Log-normal distribution with Bernoulli Gaussian noise including both background and impulsive noise components. New closed-form expressions for the outage probability, the asymptotic outage probability and ergodic capacity are derived and verified via extensive representative simulations. For more insights on the outage performance, we analyze the diversity order. Additionally, we proposed a power allocation optimization technique to achieve an outage-optimal performance. The results show that the system outage probability improves as the impulsive noise index and the arrival probability of the impulsive component of the PLC additive noise decrease, while their effect is negligible on the ergodic capacity. Finally, the performance of the proposed system is compared against a benchmark OMA-based system.