Resource Allocation for Throughput versus Fairness Trade-Offs under User Data Rate Fairness in NOMA Systems in 5G Networks

Abstract

In this work, we present a resource allocation scheme for managing trade-offs between total throughput maximisation and system fairness in a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system for 5G networks. Our proposed approach is designed to improve throughput and fairness as performance metrics of NOMA in 5G networks. We apply integer linear programming for user pairing and adopt particle swarm optimisation as the power allocation scheme for reducing resource allocation complexity. To formulate the multi-objective problem, we use scalarisation of multi-objective optimisation, which exhibits flexibility in assigning different weights to a single objective—in the case of this study, either sum rate or fairness. Moreover, the problem is formulated with a penalty function to prevent optimisation violating the constraints of the optimisation function. Simulation results show that the proposed model outperformed the conventional approach by at least 17% in terms of throughput maximisation and fairness rate.