Resource optimisation for downlink non‐orthogonal multiple access systems: a joint channel bandwidth and power allocations approach

Abstract

The emerging non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been considered as a promising scheme to reach the goals of 5G cellular systems. By enabling a group of mobile users (MUs) to share a same frequency channel and adopting the successive interference cancellation to mitigate the co-channel interference, NOMA can improve the spectrum efficiency compared with the orthogonal multiple access (OMA). This study proposes a joint optimisation scheme of the channel bandwidth and the transmit-power allocations for the NOMA downlink transmission, which aims at minimising the overall resource consumption cost including both the spectrum consumption and the power consumption, while satisfying the MUs' traffic requirements. In spite of the non-convexity nature of the joint optimisation problem, this study characterises the connection between the channel bandwidth and the associated transmit powers for the MUs. Based on this connection, this study transforms the joint optimisation problem into an equivalent bandwidth optimisation problem, and further proposes an efficient algorithm to compute the optimal bandwidth allocation (which enables us to derive the corresponding transmit powers for the MUs). Extensive numerical results are provided to validate the proposed algorithm and the advantage of the proposed joint channel bandwidth and power allocations for the NOMA transmission.