Energy Efficient Resource Allocation in Hybrid Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access Systems

By blending the concepts of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), in this paper a novel hybrid scheme is conceived for supporting diverse services in future wireless systems. Motivating to maximize energy efficiency (EE), the joint resource management of user clustering (UC) and power allocation is investigated for the downlink hybrid NOMA systems. Under two different power consumption cases, the optimal resource allocation (Opt-RA) algorithm is developed with the help of converting the original mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP) problem to the tractable decoupled problems. For practical implementation, the heuristic resource allocation (HeurRA) algorithm is also proposed, in which including a low-complexity UC algorithm based on the candidate search-and-allocation approach. Our simulation results show that, both the Opt-RA and Heur-RA algorithms achieve significantly higher EE performance than other existing algorithms. Further, the results also prove that, the hybrid NOMA conceived is able to exploit the advantages of NOMA scheme, and is superior to conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA) in terms of EE, as well as achieving higher flexibility for system configuration than NOMA

Resource allocation for NOMA wireless systems

Power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been widely recognized as a promising candidate for the next generation of wireless communication systems. By applying superposition coding at the transmitter and successive interference cancellation at the receiver, NOMA allows multiple users to access the same time-frequency resource in power domain. This way, NOMA not only increases the system’s spectral and energy efficiencies, but also supports more users when compared with the conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA). Meanwhile, improved user fairness can be achieved by NOMA. Nonetheless, the promised advantages of NOMA cannot be realized without proper resource allocation. The main resources in wireless communication systems include time, frequency, space, code and power. In NOMA systems, multiple users are accommodated in each time/frequency/code resource block (RB), forming a NOMA cluster. As a result, how to group the users into NOMA clusters and allocate the power is of significance. A large number of studies have been carried out for developing efficient power allocation (PA) algorithms in single-input single-output (SISO) scenarios with fixed user clustering. To fully reap the gain of NOMA, the design of joint PA and user clustering is required. Moreover, the study of PA under multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems still remains at an incipient stage. In this dissertation, we develop novel algorithms to allocate resource for both SISO-NOMA and MIMO-NOMA systems. More specifically, Chapter 2 compares the system capacity of MIMO-NOMA with MIMO-OMA. It is proved analytically that MIMO-NOMA outperforms MIMO-OMA in terms of both sum channel capacity and ergodic sum capacity when there are multiple users in a cluster. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the more users are admitted to a cluster, the lower is the achieved sum rate, which illustrates the tradeoff between the sum rate and maximum number of admitted users. Chapter 3 addresses the PA problem for a general multi-cluster multi-user MIMONOMA system to maximize the system energy efficiency (EE). First, a closed-form solution is derived for the corresponding sum rate (SE) maximization problem. Then, the EE maximization problem is solved by applying non-convex fractional programming. Chapter 4 investigates the energy-efficient joint user-RB association and PA problem for an uplink hybrid NOMA-OMA system. The considered problem requires to jointly optimize the user clustering, channel assignment and power allocation. To address this hard problem, a many-to-one bipartite graph is first constructed considering the users and RBs as the two sets of nodes. Based on swap matching, a joint user-RB association and power allocation scheme is proposed, which converges within a limited number of iterations. Moreover, for the power allocation under a given user-RB association, a low complexity optimal PA algorithm is proposed. Furthermore, Chapter 5 focuses on securing the confidential information of massive MIMO-NOMA networks by exploiting artificial noise (AN). An uplink training scheme is first proposed, and on this basis, the base station precodes the confidential information and injects the AN. Following this, the ergodic secrecy rate is derived for downlink transmission. Additionally, PA algorithms are proposed to maximize the SE and EE of the system. Finally, conclusions are drawn and possible extensions to resource allocation in NOMA systems are discussed in Chapter 6

Fairness Comparison of Uplink NOMA and OMA

In this paper, we compare the resource allocation fairness of uplink communications between non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) schemes and orthogonal multiple access (OMA) schemes. Through characterizing the contribution of the individual user data rate to the system sum rate, we analyze the fundamental reasons that NOMA offers a more fair resource allocation than that of OMA in asymmetric channels. Furthermore, a fairness indicator metric based on Jain's index is proposed to measure the asymmetry of multiuser channels. More importantly, the proposed metric provides a selection criterion for choosing between NOMA and OMA for fair resource allocation. Based on this discussion, we propose a hybrid NOMA-OMA scheme to further enhance the users fairness. Simulation results confirm the accuracy of the proposed metric and demonstrate the fairness enhancement of the proposed hybrid NOMA-OMA scheme compared to the conventional OMA and NOMA schemes.Comment: 6 pages, accepted for publication, VTC 2017, Spring, Sydne

Beamforming Techniques for Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access in 5G Cellular Networks

In this paper, we develop various beamforming techniques for downlink transmission for multiple-input single-output (MISO) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems. First, a beamforming approach with perfect channel state information (CSI) is investigated to provide the required quality of service (QoS) for all users. Taylor series approximation and semidefinite relaxation (SDR) techniques are employed to reformulate the original non-convex power minimization problem to a tractable one. Further, a fairness-based beamforming approach is proposed through a max-min formulation to maintain fairness between users. Next, we consider a robust scheme by incorporating channel uncertainties, where the transmit power is minimized while satisfying the outage probability requirement at each user. Through exploiting the SDR approach, the original non-convex problem is reformulated in a linear matrix inequality (LMI) form to obtain the optimal solution. Numerical results demonstrate that the robust scheme can achieve better performance compared to the non-robust scheme in terms of the rate satisfaction ratio. Further, simulation results confirm that NOMA consumes a little over half transmit power needed by OMA for the same data rate requirements. Hence, NOMA has the potential to significantly improve the system performance in terms of transmit power consumption in future 5G networks and beyond.Comment: accepted to publish in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technolog