Energy-Efficient User Pairing for Downlink NOMA in Massive MIMO Networks

The motivations for deploying energy and spectral-efficient network architectures are the high energy consumption and the need for more spectral resources in modern cellular networks. The key method to solve the energy efficiency (EE) maximization problem of the downlink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based massive MIMO system is to decouple it into user pairing and efficient power allocation problems. This work studies the performance of three main pairing methods in NOMA-based networks: Hungarian, Gale-Shapley, and correlation-based approaches. Firstly, we provide a mathematical analysis for EE of downlink NOMA in a massive MIMO system for the non-line of sight (NLoS) channel model with perfect successive interference cancellation (SIC). Finally, the sequential convex programming (SCP) approach is used to tackle the power allocation problem. Simulation results show that the Hungarian algorithm for pairing plus SCP for power allocation (Hungarian algorithm-SCP) achieves the highest energy efficiency among all the three pairing algorithms with an identical performance to joint user and resource block association with power allocation (joint user-RB PA) algorithm but with much lower computational complexity and outperforms the NOMA SCP greedy algorithm (NOMA-SCP-GA).