Dynamic Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access and Orthogonal Multiple Access in 5G Wireless Networks

In this paper, a novel framework for dynamic multiple access technology selection among orthogonal multiple access (OMA) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) techniques is proposed. For this setup, a joint resource allocation problem is formulated in which a new set of access technology selection parameters along with power and subcarrier are allocated for each user based on each user’s channel state information. Here, a novel utility function is defined to take into account the rate and costs of access technologies. This cost reflects both the complexity of performing successive interference cancellation and the complexity incurred to guarantee a desired bit error rate. This utility function can inherently capture the tradeoff between OMA and NOMA. Due to the non-convexity of the proposed resource allocation problem, a successive convex approximation is developed in which a two-step iterative algorithm is applied. In the first step, called access technology selection, the problem is transformed into a linear integer programming problem, and then, in the second step, a nonconvex problem, referred to power allocation problem, is solved via the difference-of-convex-functions (DC) programming. Moreover, the closed-form solution for power allocation in the second step is derived. For diverse network performance criteria such as rate, simulation results show that the proposed new dynamic access technology selection outperforms single-technology OMA or NOMA multiple access solutions.