Resource allocation in downlink SWIPT-based cooperative NOMA systems

Abstract

This paper considers a downlink multi-carrier cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) transmission, where no direct link exists between the far user and the base station (BS), and the communication between them only relies on the assist of the near user. Firstly, the BS sends a superimposed signal of the far and the near user to the near user, and then the near user adopts simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) to split the received superimposed signal into two portions for energy harvesting and information decoding respectively. Afterwards, the near user forwards the signal of the far user by utilizing the harvested energy. A minimum data is required to ensure the quality of service (QoS) of the far user. We jointly optimize power allocation, subcarrier allocation, time allocation, the power allocation (PA) coefficient and the power splitting (PS) ratio to maximize the number of data bits received at the near user under the energy causality constraint, the minimum data constraint and the transmission power constraint. The block-coordinate descent method and the Lagrange duality method are used to obtain a suboptimal solution of this optimization problem. In the final simulation results, the superiority of the proposed NOMA scheme is confirmed compared with the benchmark NOMA schemes and the orthogonal multiple access (OMA) scheme.