LAUSR

In this article, we introduce a small-cell network operating in the context of heterogeneous cellular networks for both downlink (DL) and uplink (UL) by deploying three techniques of full-duplex transmission mode, energy harvesting, and power domain-based non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) schemes. Compared to the conventional half-duplex orthogonal multiple access (OMA) scheme that has been widely implemented in current wireless communication systems, the full-duplex (FD) NOMA relying on energy harvesting scheme has a great potential to further enhance the system performance in terms of connectivity capability, spectral efficiency and outage performance. In the proposed two-user small-cell relying on NOMA scheme, the small-cell base station first transfers an energy-bearing signal to serve the two users in the DL phase. Later, an energy harvesting technique is proceeded to encourage the strong user and the weak user to transmit their messages in the UL phase in a FD manner. However, one major challenge related to the FD strategy is the self-interference signal due to a signal leakage from the terminal’s output to the input. Besides that, the interference from macro-cell users is also main reason of degradation of the system performance. In this article, we derive analytical expressions to describe the system’s performance in terms of the outage probability and throughput. Moreover, extensive numerical simulations are performed to compare and highlight the performance of the proposed small-cell network with several practical scenarios.