Coordinated Direct and Relayed Transmission based on NOMA and Backscattering

We propose a spectral-efficient coordinated direct and relayed transmission (CDRT) scheme for a relay-assisted downlink system with two users. The proposed scheme is based on backscatter communication (BC) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique. With the proposed BC-NOMA-CDRT scheme, both users can receive one packet within one time slot. In contrast, in existing NOMA-CDRT schemes, the far user is only able to receive one packet in two time slots due to the half-duplex operation of the relay. We investigate the outage of the BC-NOMA-CDRT scheme, and derive the outage probability expressions in closed-form based on Gamma distribution approximation and Gaussian approximation. Numerical results show that the analytical results are accurate and the BC-NOMA-CDRT scheme outperforms the conventional NOMA-CDRT significantly.