Work

Outage performance of UAV-NOMA networks over rician faded channel with hardware impairments, channel estimation error, and SIC imperfection

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: The escalating demand for enhanced coverage and high data rates in wireless networks is driving the adoption of advanced technologies like unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Integrating UAVs with non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has emerged as a promising solution to boost spectral efficiency and user connectivity. However, the practical performance of these UAV-assisted NOMA systems is critically constrained by real-world imperfections, including hardware impairments, inaccurate channel state information (CSI), and non-ideal successive interference cancellation (SIC). To address this, a reliable system design necessitates a precise outage probability analysis, which quantifies the impact of these impairments on both reliability and user experience. This work derives closed-form expressions for the outage probability of a multi-user UAV-assisted NOMA system operating over Rician fading channels, explicitly incorporating the effects of the aforementioned impairments. Analytical results are obtained for a two-user UAV-assisted NOMA system by considering the detrimental effect of hardware impairments along with imperfect CSI and SIC on system performance. These analytical results are further validated by simulated results.

Source: PLoS ONE

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0348501