A simple proportional fair scheduling for downlink power domain non-orthogonal multiple access systems

Currently, non-orthogonal multiple access technologies have gained high relevance in wireless multi-user broadband communications. Many papers have shown that non-orthogonal multiplexing can significantly increase the capacity of the system. Despite this, it technology is still far from practical implementation due to unresolved issues. One such issue is radio resource scheduling in communication systems using non-orthogonal multiple access which poses a high computational complexity and turns out to be a problem for a base station with a large number of users it serves. In our paper, we propose our own resource scheduling method for systems with non-orthogonal multiplexing using proportional fair strategy. This method allows for simultaneous resource scheduling in two segments - an orthogonal segment (time-frequency domain) and a non-orthogonal segment (power domain). To assess the effectiveness of the proposed method, we use the developed simulation model of resource scheduling for a communication system with a single cell. The effectiveness of the proposed scheduling method is confirmed by the simulation result, and its use allows achieving the proportional fair strategy implementation. In the final part, we use iterative simulation to compare the throughput of systems with orthogonal and non-orthogonal multiplexing using proposed proportional fair scheduler. The result of comparison showed that using the proposed proportional fair scheduling can increase the system capacity by an average of 28%. The results can be applied to create communication systems with different non-orthogonal multiple access implementations.