This paper investigates a relay assisted simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) for downlink in cellular systems. Cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (C-NOMA) is employed along with power splitting (PS) protocol to enable both energy harvesting (EH) and information processing (IP). A downlink model consisting of a base station (BS) and two users is considered, in which the near user (NU) is selected as a relay to forward the received signal from the BS to the far user (FU). Maximum ratio combining is then employed at the FU to combine both the signals received from the BS and NU. Closed form expressions of outage probability (OP), throughput, ergodic rate and energy efficiency (EE) are firstly derived for the SWIPT based C-NOMA considering both scenarios of having and without having direct link between the BS and FU. The impacts of EH time, EH efficiency, power-splitting ratio, source data rate and distance between different nodes on the performance are then investigated. The simulation results show that the C-NOMA with direct link achieves an outperformed performance over C-NOMA without direct link. Moreover, the performance of C-NOMA with direct link is also higher than that for OMA. Specifically, (i) the outage probability for C-NOMA in both direct and relaying link cases is always lower than that for OMA. (ii) the outage probability, throughput and ergodic rate vary according to b, (iii) the EE of both users can obtain in SNR range of from -10 to 5 dB and it decreases linearly as SNR increases. Numerical results are provided to verify the findings.