Placement and Power Allocation for NOMA-UAV Networks

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be used as flying base stations to provide ubiquitous connections for mobile devices in over-crowded areas. On the other hand, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a promising technique to support massive connectivity. In this letter, the placement and power allocation (PA) are jointly optimized to improve the performance of the NOMA-UAV network. Since the formulated joint optimization problem is non-convex, the location of the UAV is first optimized, with the total path loss from the UAV to users minimized. Then, the PA for NOMA is optimized using the optimal location of the UAV to maximize the sum rate of the network. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme for NOMA-UAV networks.