Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation in NOMA Heterogeneous Networks

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has attracted much recent attention owing to its capability for improving the system spectral efficiency in wireless communications. Deploying NOMA in heterogeneous network can satisfy users’ explosive data traffic requirements, and NOMA will likely play an important role in the fifth-generation (5G) mobile communication networks. However, NOMA brings new technical challenges on resource allocation due to the mutual cross-tier interference in heterogeneous networks. In this article, to study the tradeoff between data rate performance and energy consumption in NOMA, we examine the problem of energy-efficient user scheduling and power optimization in 5G NOMA heterogeneous networks. The energy-efficient user scheduling and power allocation schemes are introduced for the downlink 5G NOMA heterogeneous network for perfect and imperfect channel state information (CSI) respectively. Simulation results show that the resource allocation schemes can significantly increase the energy efficiency of 5G NOMA heterogeneous network for both cases of perfect CSI and imperfect CSI. Haijun Zhang and Keping Long are with the Engineering and Technology Research Center for Convergence Networks, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, 100083, China (e-mail: [email protected], [email protected]). Fang Fang and Julian Cheng are with School of Engineering, The University of British Columbia, Kelowna, BC, V1X 1V7, Canada (e-mail: [email protected], [email protected]). Wei Wang is with the College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China, and also with the Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Information Processing, Communication and Networking, Hangzhou 310027, China (e-mail: [email protected]). Victor C.M. Leung is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4 Canada (e-mail: [email protected]). January 16, 2018 DRAFT