Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has received considerable recent attention as a promising candidate for 5G systems. A key feature of NOMA is that users with better channel conditions have prior information about the messages of other users. This prior knowledge is fully exploited in this letter, where a cooperative NOMA scheme is proposed. The outage probability and diversity order achieved by this cooperative NOMA scheme are analyzed, and an approach based on user pairing is also proposed to reduce system complexity.

Cooperative Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access in 5G Systems