PurposeAmong the proposed radio access strategies for improving system execution in 5G networks, the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme is the prominent one.Design/methodology/approachAmong the most fundamental NOMA methods, power-domain NOMA is the one where at the transmitter, superposition coding is used, and at the receiver, successive interference cancellation (SIC) is used. The importance of power allocation (PA) in achieving appreciable SIC and high system throughput cannot be overstated.FindingsThis research focuses on an outage probability analysis of NOMA downlink system under various channel conditions like Rayleigh, Rician and Nakagami-m fading channel. The system design's objectives, techniques and constraints for NOMA-based 5G networks' PA strategies are comprehensively studied.Practical implicationsFrom the results of this study, it is found that the outage probability performance of downlink ordered NOMA under Rayleigh, Rician and Nakagami-m fading channel was good.Originality/valueOutage probability analysis of downlink ordered NOMA under various channel conditions like Rayleigh, Rician and Nakagami-m fading channels were employed. Though the performance of Nakagami-m fading channel is lesser compared to Rayleigh channel, the performance for user 1 and user 2 are good.