RIS-aided Cooperative FD-SWIPT-NOMA Outage Performance in Nakagami-m Channels

Abstract: In this work, we investigate reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS)-assisted cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (C-NOMA) consisting of two paired users, where the phases of RIS are configured to boost the cell-center device. The cell-center device is designated to act as a full-duplex (FD) relay to assist the cell-edge device. The cell-center device does not use its battery energy to cooperate but harvests energy using simultaneous wireless information power transfer (SWIPT). A more practical non-linear energy harvesting model is considered. Expressions for outage probability (OP) and ergodic rate (ER) are devised, assuming that all users' links undergo Nakagami-$m$ channel fading. We first approximate the harvested power as Gamma random variables via the moments matching technique. This allows us to derive analytical OP/ER expressions that are simple to compute yet accurate for a wide range of RIS passive elements configurations, energy harvesting (EH) coefficients, and residual self-interference (SI) levels, being extensively validated by numerical simulations. The OP expressions reveal how paramount is to mitigate the SI in the FD relay mode since for reasonable values of residual SI coefficient ($\omega \geq -20$dB), it is notable its detrimental effect on the system performance. Also, numerical results reveal that increasing the number of RIS elements can benefit the cooperative system more than the non-cooperative one.