UAV‐Assisted NOMA‐Enabled Relay Communication

ABSTRACT This study evaluates the performance of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)‐assisted decode‐and‐forward (DF) relaying network. It investigates the use of Non‐orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) to ensure fairness, low latency, and added security. The impact of the transmission antenna selection technique on the network's performance, specifically the outage probability of each group of users, is analyzed. The study derives closed‐form expressions for the outage probability considering the Rayleigh fading channel and evaluates the significance of NOMA ordering, channel state information (CSI), and successive interference cancellation (SIC) on the performance. Monte Carlo simulations validate the accuracy of the analytical expressions and show that factors such as imperfect CSI, SIC methods, and NOMA ordering all significantly impact outage performance in the relaying networks.