Abstract: The performance of non-orthogonal multiple access(NOMA) fixed gain amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying networks is investigated, and the different links are considered with different fading channels. In particular, both transceiver hardware impairments and channel estimation are considered. At the receiver, the destination node processes the received information using selection combining (SC) algorithm. To analyze the performance of the users, the analytical closed-form expressions for the outage probability of users’ symbols are derived. In addition, the approximate analysis of the outage probability reveals the insights of the parameters for both hardware impairments and channel estimation on the network performance. Simulation results indicate that outage probability is limited by the levels of distortion noise and channel estimation error.

Key words: channel estimation, hardware impairments, non-orthogonal multiple access, Nakagami-m fading, Rayleigh fading