Optimized Power Allocation for a Cooperative NOMA System with SWIPT and an Energy-Harvesting User

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the solution to an optimisation problem to minimise the total transmission power at the transmitter in a cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system with simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) and an energy-harvesting user. First, we formulate the optimisation problem to obtain the minimum transmission power at the transmitter under the constraints of minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio and minimum energy harvesting. Since the problem is not convex, we transform it into a bi-level optimisation problem. Then, conditions to guarantee the feasibility of the problem are provided, and we derive the analytical optimal solution via the Lagrange method meeting Karush–Kuhn–Tucker optimality conditions to solve the lower-level variables of the inner convex problem. Second, we use particle swarm optimisation to find the approximately optimal values of the upper-level variables. Next, we present two baseline schemes based on orthogonal multiple access (OMA) and equal power splitting for performance comparison with the proposed cooperative NOMA system with SWIPT. Finally, simulation results show that cooperative NOMA with SWIPT can reduce the transmit power at the transmitter, compared to two baseline schemes: OMA and EPS.