On the Performance of Wireless-Powered NOMA Communication Networks

Abstract

In different modern and future wireless communication networks, a large number of low-power user equipment (UE) devices like Internet of Things, sensor terminals, and smart modules have to be supported over constrained power and bandwidth resources. Therefore, wireless-powered communication (WPC) is considered a promising technology for varied applications in which the energy harvesting (EH) from radio frequency radiations is exploited for data transmission. This requires efficient resource allocation schemes to optimize the performance of WPC and prolong the network lifetime. In this paper, harvest-then-transmit-based WP non-orthogonal multiple access (WP-NOMA) system is designed with time-split (TS) and power control (PC) allocation strategies. To evaluate the network performance, the sum rate and UEs’ rates expressions are derived considering power-domain NOMA with successive interference cancellation detection. For comparison purposes, the rate performance of the conventional WP orthogonal multiple access (WP-OMA) is derived also considering orthogonal frequency-division multiple access and time-division multiple access schemes. Intensive investigations are conducted to obtain the best TS and PC resource parameters that enable maximum EH for higher data transmission rates compared with the reference WP-OMA techniques. The achieved outcomes demonstrate the effectiveness of designed resource allocation approaches in terms of the realized sum rate, UE’s rate, rate region, and fairness without distressing the restricted power of far UEs.