Power allocation and temporal fair user group scheduling for downlink NOMA

Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) has been proposed as a new radio access technique for cellular networks as an alternative to OMA (Orthogonal Multiple Access) in which the users of a group (pairs or triples of users in a group are considered in this paper) are allowed to use the wireless channel simultaneously. In this paper, for downlink single-input single-output SISO-NOMA, a heuristic power allocation algorithm within a group is first proposed which attempts to ensure that the users of a group benefit from simultaneous transmission equally in terms of achievable throughput. Moreover, a user group scheduling algorithm is proposed for downlink NOMA systems by which a user group is to be dynamically selected for transmission while satisfying long term temporal fairness among the individual contending users. The effectiveness of the proposed power allocation method along with the temporal fair scheduling algorithm for downlink NOMA is validated with simulations and the performance impact of the transmit power and the coverage radius of the base station as well as the number of users are thoroughly studied.