Coexistence of URLLC and eMBB Services in MIMO-NOMA Systems

Abstract

Enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) and ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (URLLC) are two major expected services in the fifth-generation mobile communication systems (5G). Specifically, eMBB applications support extremely high data rate communications, while URLLC services aim to provide stringent latency with high reliability communications. Due to their differentiated quality-of-service (QoS) requirements, the spectrum sharing between URLLC and eMBB services becomes a challenging scheduling issue. In this paper, we aim to investigate the URLLC and eMBB co-scheduling/coexistence problem under a puncturing technique in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems. The objective function is formulated to maximize the data rate of eMBB users while satisfying the latency requirements of URLLC users through joint user selection and power allocation scheduling. To solve this problem, we first introduce an eMBB user clustering mechanism to balance the system throughput and computational complexity. Thereafter, we decompose the original problem into two subproblems, namely the scheduling problem of user selection and power allocation. We introduce a Gale-Shapley (GS) theory to solve the user selection problem, and a successive convex approximation (SCA) and a difference of convex (DC) programming to deal with the power allocation problem. Finally, an iterative algorithm is utilized to find the global solution with low computational complexity. Numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms, and verify the proposed approach outperforms other baseline methods.