Joint Transmission Scheduling and Power Allocation in Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access

Multi-carrier based non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is an effective method to meet the ever-increasing demands of both user throughput and energy efficiency by multiplexing multiple users on the same carrier. Since interference from users with a poorer channel gain can be canceled at a user with a strong channel gain by successive interference cancellation, NOMA can enhance the system performance. To improve the downlink system performance, it is crucial to appropriately determine users scheduled on each carrier and power allocation at the base station. However, the existing works are generally either heuristic or local optimal due to the mixed optimization problem. In this paper, we focus on the global optimal solutions to maximize user throughput and energy efficiency in NOMA, respectively. In particular, we first formulate the mixed integer optimization problem which are intractable to be solved. Fortunately, by the provided analytical results, the optimization models can be largely simplified. Then, we propose the architectures of joint user scheduling and power allocation in NOMA, as well as the corresponding optimal algorithms. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithms indeed outperform existing works in terms of the user throughput and energy efficiency, respectively.