Joint User Pairing, Subchannel Assignment and Power Allocation in Cooperative Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access Networks

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of user pairing, subchannel assignment and power allocation in a downlink cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) network. A joint user pairing and subchannel assignment algorithm is proposed that pairs a user having strong channel conditions with a user having weak channel conditions and assigns them a subchannel simultaneously. Each strong user acts as a relay for the weak user. A Stackelberg game (SG) is employed and a closed-form solution is given to allocate power among the users by the base station (BS) considering the mutual benefits of each user and the BS. Simulation results prove the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in terms of average sum rate of users as compared to that of the cooperative orthogonal multiple access (OMA) scheme and existing NOMA schemes.