Power allocation scheme for sum rate and fairness trade-off in downlink NOMA networks

Abstract

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is an essential enabler technology that is expected to help satisfy the key requirements of increased system throughput in future wireless networks. However, another equally important aspect that should go hand-in-hand with system throughput is user fairness for any network. But, to the best of our knowledge, even though there have been works that look at system throughput or user fairness maximization for NOMA-based networks, they looked at these as a single objective optimization problem, where one is the objective and the other is one of the constraints. However, quite often, joint optimization of both system throughput and user fairness is required to make optimized decisions in the face of trade-offs between these two equally important but conflicting objectives. In this regard, this paper formulates a multi-objective optimization problem to jointly maximize the sum rate and user fairness in a downlink transmission NOMA system, through optimize power allocation (PA), under system-imposed constraints. A weighted sum approach is used to turn the multi-objective optimization problem into a single-objective optimization problem to make it analytically tractable. The optimized PA is then obtained using Lagrange dual decomposition method and Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) conditions. Using our derived expressions, we propose an iterative PA algorithm that converges fast enough to be employed in practical NOMA networks. We also present simulation results to highlight the effectiveness of the proposed solution. Further, the performance of the proposed method is compared with that of the benchmark methods.