Relay-Aided Multiple Access Scheme in Two-Point Joint Transmission

Abstract

As the era of Internet of Things is approaching, huge number of devices need to be included in the network, and the long standby time of devices should also be satisfied. To solve these problems, in this paper, a relay-aided multiple access (RAMA) transmission scheme based on network coding is considered in joint transmission with two base stations (BSs). In the scheme, the near user acts as a two-way relay node between the BS and the far user based on machine-to-machine communications for both downlink and uplink transmissions. At first for two users, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is employed to compare with the proposed RAMA scheme in terms of the achievable sum rates. From the analysis, we can show that for NOMA and RAMA, one outperforms the other under different conditions. Then, we consider the case of multiple user pairs, for which an adaptive RAMA-NOMA transmission scenario is developed to make full use of their respective advantages. In the scenario, an optimal power allocation scheme based on the branch and bound (BB) algorithm and a low-complexity user pairing scheme based on a greedy algorithm are proposed. Numerical results show that our proposed adaptive RAMA-NOMA transmission scenario can achieve a higher sum rate compared with RAMA or NOMA only scheme, and under the optimal power allocation based on BB, the performance of our proposed user pairing scheme is close to that of the optimal pairing method using an exhaustive search, and significantly outperforms the random selection method.