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

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.