Effective capacity of cooperative relaying systems with non-orthogonal multiple access

In this paper, we present analytical results on the effective capacity (EC) for a dual-hop cooperative network employing non-orthogonal multiple access and the decode-and-forward half-duplex relaying protocol. Assuming that wireless propagation is modelled by the Nakagami-m distribution, novel analytical results for the EC are deduced. These analytical results are further extended to the generalized fading channels, modeled by a mixture gamma distribution. Our proposed analysis is validated by numerical results and Monte-Carlo simulations. Besides, the numerically evaluated results have demonstrated the impact of various system-level parameters on the performance of the considered system, including the impact of fading, the power allocation coefficient and the delay constraints.