NOMA-based Radio Resource Allocation for Machine Type Communications in 5G and Beyond Cellular Networks

In this paper, the minimum bandwidth resource allocation problem for non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) based machine to machine (M2M) communications in 5G and beyond cellular networks is investigated. In order to solve the problem fast and efficiently, a persistent resource allocation based polynomial-time algorithm considering NOMA and the periodicity of the machine type communication traffic is proposed. The algorithm consists of two phases. In first phase, M2M clusters are divided into NOMA sub-clusters using a technique that minimizes the number of NOMA sub-clusters for a set of devices. In second phase, NOMA sub-clusters are allocated to resource blocks (RB) considering their quality of service (QoS) requirements while achieving minimum bandwidth reservation. Through simulations, the performance of the proposed algorithm is presented in comparison to the previously proposed access grant time interval (AGTI) based radio resource allocation algorithms. It is illustrated that the proposed algorithm improves the spectrum-efficiency significantly.