Optimal Joint Power and Subcarrier Allocation for MC-NOMA Systems

In this paper, we investigate the resource allocation algorithm design for multicarrier non-orthogonal multiple access (MC-NOMA) systems. The proposed algorithm is obtained from the solution of a non-convex optimization problem for the maximization of the weighted system throughput. We employ monotonic optimization to develop the optimal joint power and subcarrier allocation policy. The optimal resource allocation policy serves as a performance benchmark due to its high complexity. Furthermore, to strike a balance between computational complexity and optimality, a suboptimal scheme with low computational complexity is proposed. Our simulation results reveal that the suboptimal algorithm achieves a close-to-optimal performance and MC-NOMA employing the proposed resource allocation algorithm provides a substantial system throughput improvement compared to conventional multicarrier orthogonal multiple access (MC-OMA).Comment: Submitted to Globecom 201

Joint Subcarrier and Power Allocation in NOMA: Optimal and Approximate Algorithms

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a promising technology to increase the spectral efficiency and enable massive connectivity in 5G and future wireless networks. In contrast to orthogonal schemes, such as OFDMA, NOMA multiplexes several users on the same frequency and time resource. Joint subcarrier and power allocation problems (JSPA) in NOMA are NP-hard to solve in general. In this family of problems, we consider the weighted sum-rate (WSR) objective function as it can achieve various tradeoffs between sum-rate performance and user fairness. Because of JSPA's intractability, a common approach in the literature is to solve separately the power control and subcarrier allocation (also known as user selection) problems, therefore achieving sub-optimal result. In this work, we first improve the computational complexity of existing single-carrier power control and user selection schemes. These improved procedures are then used as basic building blocks to design new algorithms, namely Opt-JSPA, $\varepsilon$-JSPA and Grad-JSPA. Opt-JSPA computes an optimal solution with lower complexity than current optimal schemes in the literature. It can be used as a benchmark for optimal WSR performance in simulations. However, its pseudo-polynomial time complexity remains impractical for real-world systems with low latency requirements. To further reduce the complexity, we propose a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme called $\varepsilon$-JSPA. Since, no approximation has been studied in the literature, $\varepsilon$-JSPA stands out by allowing to control a tight trade-off between performance guarantee and complexity. Finally, Grad-JSPA is a heuristic based on gradient descent. Numerical results show that it achieves near-optimal WSR with much lower complexity than existing optimal methods