Hybrid Decode- and Amplify-and-Forward Protocol for NOMA-Enabled Power Line Communication

In this paper, we consider the performance of hybrid decode- and amplify-and-forward (HDAF) relaying protocol for single-stage non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in power line communications. The HDAF relaying combines to advantages of decode-and-forward (DF) and amplify-and forward (AF) schemes, which is particularly useful when the DF relay fails to decode a NOMA symbol while employing successive interference cancellation. We present an analysis to obtain closed-form expressions for the outage probabilities at the relay and destination nodes. We validate our analysis through Monte Carlo simulations and numerical techniques, and show that the HDAF relaying outperforms DF and AF schemes, in terms of outage probability.