DSF-NOMA: UAV-Assisted Emergency Communication Technology in a Heterogeneous Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has significant importance in the beyond fifth generation (B5G) communication systems. However, the IoT is vulnerable to disasters because the network is mains powered and the devices are delicate. In this paper, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is utilized to assist with emergency communications in a heterogeneous IoT (Het-IoT) and a distributed nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme is proposed without the requirement of successive interference cancelation (SIC). In order to accommodate the communications of the surviving users and IoT devices efficiently, a multiobjective resource allocation (MORA) scheme is proposed for the UAV-assisted Het-IoT. At first, the original MORA problem is formulated and decoupled with the user power initialization. Then, based on a reweighted message-passing algorithm (ReMPA), the subchannels are assigned to the devices and the users in a stepwise manner. Finally, the transmitting power of the users and the devices is jointly fine-tuned using an iterative access control scheme. The simulation results confirm that the distributed SIC-free NOMA (DSF-NOMA) based on the MORA scheme provides satisfactory communication performances for the users and the devices with a tradeoff between the two subsystems. Compared with the traditional orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) scheme and the MORA scheme with random subchannel assignment, the proposed DSF-NOMA-based MORA scheme yields better performances in terms of the sum rate of the users and the access ratio of the devices.