Coverage Analysis for Dense Heterogeneous Networks with Cooperative NOMA

Abstract

In a heterogeneous cellular network (HetNet) consisting of $M$ tiers of densely-deployed base stations (BSs), consider that each of the BSs in the HetNet that are associated with multiple users is able to simultaneously schedule and serve two users in a downlink time slot by performing the (power-domain) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme. This paper aims at the preliminary study on the downlink coverage performance of the HetNet with the \textit{non-cooperative} and the proposed \textit{cooperative} NOMA schemes. First, we study the coverage probability of the NOMA users for the non-cooperative NOMA scheme in which no BSs are coordinated to jointly transmit the NOMA signals for a particular cell and the coverage probabilities of the two NOMA users of the BSs in each tier are derived. We show that the coverage probabilities can be largely reduced if allocated transmit powers for the NOMA users are not satisfied with some constraints. Next, we study and derive the coverage probabilities for the proposed cooperative NOMA scheme in which the void BSs that are not tagged by any users are coordinated to enhance the far NOMA user in a particular cell. Our analyses show that cooperative NOMA can significantly improve the coverage of all NOMA users as long as the transmit powers for the NOMA users are properly allocated.