The paper investigates the improvement of using maximum ratio combining (MRC) in cooperative vehicular communications (VCs) transmission schemes considering non-orthogonal multiple access scheme (NOMA) at intersections. The transmission occurs between a source and two destination nodes with a help of a relay. The transmission is subject to interference originated from vehicles that are located on the roads. Closed form outage probability expressions are obtained. We compare the performance of MRC cooperative NOMA with a classical cooperative NOMA, and show that implementing MRC in cooperative NOMA transmission offers a significant improvement over the classical cooperative NOMA in terms of outage probability. We also compare the performance of MRC cooperative NOMA with MRC cooperative orthogonal multiple access (OMA), and we show that NOMA has a better performance than OMA. Finally, we show that the outage probability increases when the nodes come closer to the intersection, and that using MRC considering NOMA improves the performance in this context. The analysis is verified with Monte Carlo simulations.
A. MotivationRoad traffic safety is a major issue, and more particularly at intersections since 50% of accidents occurs at intersections [2]. Vehicular communications (VCs) offer several applications for accident prevention, or alerting vehicles when accidents happen in their vicinity. Thus, high reliability and low latency communications are required in safety-based vehicular communications. To increase the data rate and spectral efficiency [3] in the fifth generation (5G) of communication systems, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is an appropriate candidate as a multiple access scheme. Unlike orthogonal multiple access (OMA), NOMA allows multiple users to share the same resource with different power allocation levels.
B. Related WorksNOMA is an efficient multiple access technique for spectrum use. It has been shown that NOMA outperforms OMA [4]-[8]. However, few research investigates the effect of co-channel interference and their impact on the performance considering direct transmission [9]-[11], and cooperative transmission [12]. Regarding VCs, several works investigate the effect of interference considering OMA in highway scenarios [13]. As for intersection scenarios, the performance in terms of success probability are derivated [14], [15]. The performance of vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communications are evaluated for multiple intersections scheme in [16]. In [17], the authors derive the outage probability of a V2V communications with power control strategy. In [18], the authors investigate the impact of a line of sight and non line of sight transmissions at intersections considering Nakagami-fading channels. The authors in [19] study the effect of mobility of vehicular communications at road junctions. In [20]-[23], the authors respectively study the impact of non-orthogonal multiple access, and cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access with NOMA at intersections. The authors further extended their wor...