The simultaneous wireless information and power transfer or energy harvesting (EH) can be combined in nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) as green applications towards 5G. This paper investigates a new cooperative EH-NOMA protocol, where the intermediate relay has not equipped the fixed power source and acts as a wireless powered relay to help signal transmission to representative weak user and strong user in NOMA. However, impacts of imperfect channel estimation contribute to outage system performance evaluations. We formulate the power resource assignment paradigms as two schemes, namely, fixed power allocation and dynamic power allocation, by considering imperfect channel state information (CSI). To solve this problem, we derive the closed-form expressions of outage probability under imperfect CSI and the power allocation constraints. The expected numerical results related to the derived expressions for the outage probability are examined that numerical and the Monte Carlo simulations are strictly matching lines. KEYWORDS energy harvesting, imperfect channel state information, NOMA, outage probability Int J Commun Syst. 2018;31:e3789.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/dac