Outage Constrained Power Efficient Design for Downlink NOMA Systems With Partial HARQ

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to design an adaptive power allocation scheme to minimize the average transmit power of a hybrid automatic repeat request with chase combining (HARQ-CC) enabled non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system under strict outage constraints of users. Specifically, we assume that the base station only knows the statistical channel state information of the users. To achieve power efficient design and cope with the reliable transmissions of users, a partial HARQ-CC scheme is proposed. We first focus on the two-user case. To evaluate the performance of the two-user partial HARQ-CC enabled NOMA system, we first analyze the outage probability of each user. Then, an average power minimization problem is formulated. However, the attained expressions of the outage probabilities are nonconvex, and thus make the problem challenging to solve. Hence, we propose to use a successive convex approximation (SCA) based algorithm to solve the problem iteratively. Meanwhile, we prove that the proposed algorithm can converge to a Karush–Kuhn–Tucker point of the original problem. For more practical applications, we also investigate the partial HARQ-CC enabled transmissions in the multi-user scenario. The user pairing and power allocation problem is considered. With the aid of matching theory, a low complexity algorithm is presented to first handle the user pairing problem. Then the power allocation problem for each user pair is solved by the proposed SCA-based algorithm. Simulation results show the efficiency of the proposed transmission strategy and the near-optimality of the proposed algorithms.