Outage Probability of UAV-Assisted Dual-Hop RF-UWOC Systems Leveraging NOMA

This paper investigates an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted dual-hop radio frequency-underwater wireless optical communication (RF-UWOC) system using non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) for efficient multi-user transmission. The RF link incorporates path loss and Nakagami-m fading, while the UWOC link accounts for path loss, pointing errors, and Exponential-Generalized Gamma (EGG) fading. Considering the effect of imperfect successive interference cancellation (SIC), novel exact and asymptotic analytical expressions of outage probability for both NOMA users are derived under decode-and-forward (DF) and amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying schemes in terms of Meijer's G and bivariate Fox's H functions. Monte carlo simulations are performed to validate the derived analytical results.