Nonorthogonal Multiple Access With Energy Harvesting-Based Alternate Relaying

For a downlink communication system, we propose a nonorthogonal multiple access scheme with two energy harvesting relays. The base station (BS) transmits the data of both near and far users simultaneously using the superposition coding technique. Two relays alternately amplify and forward the data to the far-user. Each relay can harvest wireless energy from the signals of both the BS and the other transmitting relay, so each relay can achieve more opportunities to accumulate more energy for a higher-quality cooperative relaying. The near-user performs adaptive interference cancelation to retrieve its desired data. Numerical results show that the nonorthogonal scheme greatly outperforms the orthogonal scheme in terms of throughput.