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In this paper, cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (C-NOMA) is considered in short packet communications with finite blocklength (FBL) codes. The performance of a decode-and-forward (DF) relaying along with selection combining (SC) and maximum ratio combining (MRC) strategies at the receiver side is examined. We explore joint user pairing and resource allocation to maximize fair throughput in a downlink (DL) scenario. In each pair, the user with a stronger channel (strong user) acts as a relay for the other one (weak user), and optimal power and blocklength are allocated to achieve max-min throughput. To this end, first, only one pair is considered, and optimal resource allocation is explored. Also, a suboptimal algorithm is suggested, which converges to a near-optimal solution. Finally, the problem is extended to a general scenario, and a suboptimal C-NOMA-based user pairing is proposed. Numerical results show that the proposed C-NOMA scheme in both SC and MRC strategies significantly improves the users' fair throughput compared to the NOMA and OMA. It is also investigated that the proposed pairing scheme based on C-NOMA outperforms the Hybrid NOMA/OMA scheme from the average throughput perspective, while the fairness index degrades slightly.

Summary The abundant benefits of Orthogonal Frequency‐Division Multiplexing and its high flexibility have resulted in its widespread applications in many telecommunication standards. One important parameter for improving wireless system's efficiency is the accurate estimation of channel state information. In the literatures, many techniques have been studied in order to estimate the channel state information. Nowadays, the techniques based on intelligent algorithms such as genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization (PSO) have attracted attention of researchers. With a very low pilot overhead, these techniques are able to estimate the channel frequency response properly only using the received signals. Unfortunately, each of these techniques suffers a common weakness: they have a slow convergence rate. In this paper, a new intelligent and different method has been presented for channel estimation using learning automata, entitled LA estimator, where the learning automata are search agents, and each pair is responsible for searching 1 complex coefficient of the channel frequency response. This method can achieve an accurate channel estimation with a moderate computational complexity in comparison with GA and PSO estimators. Furthermore, with higher convergence rate, our proposed method is capable of providing the same performance as GA and PSO. For a 2‐path fast fading channel, simulation results demonstrate the robustness of our proposed scheme according to the bit error rate and the mean square error.