Energy Efficiency of Resource Scheduling for Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) Wireless Network

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a promising technique for the fifth generation mobile communication due to its high spectrum efficiency. By applying superposition coding and successive interference cancellation techniques, multiple users can be multiplexed on the same subchannel in NOMA systems. Previous works focus on subchannel and power allocation to maximize the sum rate; however, the energy-efficient resource allocation problem has not been studied for NOMA systems. In this paper, we aim to optimize subchannel assignment and power allocation to maximize the energy efficiency for the downlink NOMA network. Assuming perfect knowledge of the channel state information at base station, we propose low-complexity suboptimal algorithms which include subchannel assignment and power allocation for subchannel users. In the power allocation scheme, difference of convex functions programming approach is exploited to transform and approximate the original optimal problem into a convex optimization problem. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithms yield much better improvements than orthogonal frequency division multiple in terms of sum rate and energy efficiency.