Outage Analysis of an Incremental Relaying Aided Accumulated Energy harvesting Based Two Users NOMA Network Assisted by an IRS

In this paper, we investigate an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) assisted incremental relaying (IR) based nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) network under accumulated energy harvesting (Acc-EH) scheme following time switching relaying (TSR) protocol. In this setup, the near user acts as a half duplex energy harvesting relay, adopting decode and forward (DF) protocol to forward information to the far user through an IRS in absence of a direct path between them, in the case of incremental relaying (IR). The near user uses TSR node of energy harvesting and accumulates harvested energy over idle frames of no transmission to the far user and uses the accumulated energy while transmitting in IR mode. Outage probabilities of the individual users, overall system outage are derived analytically utilizing the statistics of accumulated harvesting energy. Energy efficiency of the system is assessed. The outage performance of accumulation case is compared with conventional non-accumulation energy harvesting (non Acc-EH) based IR scheme. Impact of number of IRS elements, energy accumulation and harvesting parameter on the outage performance is indicated. We verify our analytical results by MATLAB based Monte Carlo simulation and show that accumulation of harvested energy outperforms the conventional scheme of no accumulation.