Short-Packet Communications in Multi-Antenna Cooperative NOMA Networks with Hardware Impairments

This work examines the performance of a multi-antenna cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) network that employs short-packet communications and operates under the effect of hardware impairments. Specifically, a multi-antenna source transmits superposition-coded NOMA signals to a near user and a far user. Acting as a decode-and-forward (DF) relay, the near user adopts successive interference cancellation (SIC) to decode and subsequently forward the message intended for the far user. In addition, the transmission strategy at the source is the maximum ratio transmission (MRT) and the reception strategy at the far user is selection combining (SC). For Nakagami-<i>m</i> fading channels, closed-form expressions for the average block error rate (BLER) and effective throughput are derived. Then, the effective throughput is maximized through the optimization of the blocklength, accounting for constraints on transmission latency and reliability. The results obtained from simulations confirm the analytical findings and demonstrate that the proposed scheme, with a two-antenna source configuration, achieves a superior effective throughput, reaching up to 240% at a transmit signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 33 dB, compared to the existing NOMA scheme in the literature.