Performance Analysis of Dual-Hop Hybrid RF-UOWC NOMA Systems

Area of Science:

• Wireless Communication
• Optical Communication
• Signal Processing

Background:

• Hybrid radio frequency-underwater optical wireless communication (RF-UOWC) is crucial for seamless air-water data transmission.
• Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) significantly boosts spectral efficiency in wireless systems.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose and analyze a downlink NOMA-based dual-hop hybrid RF-UOWC system with decode-and-forward relaying.
• To investigate system performance under exponential-generalized Gamma (EGG) and Rayleigh fading channels with imperfect successive interference cancellation (SIC).

Main Methods:

• Derivation of exact closed-form outage probabilities and approximated ergodic capacities for NOMA users.
• Monte-Carlo simulations to validate performance across diverse underwater scenarios.
• Analysis of asymptotic outage probabilities and diversity order.

Main Results:

• The proposed NOMA system demonstrates superior performance compared to orthogonal multiple access (OMA).
• Power allocation optimization yields outage-optimal performance.
• Accurate analytical expressions are derived for system performance evaluation.

Conclusions:

• The hybrid RF-UOWC system with NOMA offers significant gains in spectral efficiency and communication reliability.
• The derived performance metrics provide valuable insights for designing future hybrid communication networks.
• Imperfect SIC is considered, offering a practical approach to performance analysis.