Cooperative Wireless-Powered NOMA Relaying for B5G IoT Networks With Hardware Impairments and Channel Estimation Errors

Massive connectivity and limited energy are main challenges for the beyond 5G (B5G)-enabled massive Internet of Things (IoT) to maintain diversified Qualify of Service (QoS) of the huge number of IoT device users. Motivated by these challenges, this article studies the performance of cooperative simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) for massive IoT systems. Under the practical assumption, residual hardware impairments (RHIs) and channel estimation errors (CEEs) are taken into account. The communication between the base station (BS) and two NOMA IoT device users is realized through a direct link and the assistance of multiple relays with finite energy storage capability that can harvest energy from the BS. Aiming at improving the system performance, an optimal relay is selected among K relays by using the partial relay selection (PRS) protocol to forward the received signal to the two NOMA IoT device users, namely, the far user (FU) and near user (NU). To evaluate the system performance, exact analytical expressions for the outage probability (OP) are derived in closed form. In order to get a better understanding of the overall system performance, we further undertake diversity order analyses by deriving asymptotic expressions for the OP in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. In addition, we also investigate the energy efficiency (EE) of the considered system, which is a crucial performance metric in massive IoT systems so that the impact of key system parameters on the performance can be quantified. Finally, the optimal power allocation scheme to maximize the sum rate of the considered system in the high SNR regime is also designed. Numerical results have shown that: 1) hardware impairment parameter has a deleterious effect on system performance while the channel estimation parameter is always beneficial to the OP; 2) the expected performance improvements obtained by the user of PRS protocol are enhanced by increasing the number of relays; and 3) the proposed power allocation scheme can optimize the sum-rate performance of the considered system.