A Frequency Domain Scheduling for Uplink Single Carrier Non-orthogonal Multiple Access with Iterative Interference Cancellation

This paper proposes a frequency-domain (FD) scheduling for an uplink single carrier non-orthogonal multiple access (SC-NOMA) with the assistance of iterative interference cancellation (IC). In the SC-NOMA, an evolved Node B (eNB) with an iterative IC receiver is capable of allocating overlapped spectra to plural intra-cell user equipments (UEs) exceeding the number of receive antennas. As a result, the SC-NOMA can enhance the spectral efficiency owing to the non-orthogonal multiplexing. However, when the subband (SB) criterion scheduling, that assigns an SB to a UE on the basis of the metric only on an SB, is applied, this scheduling is not suitable in the SC-NOMA. This is because the throughput in single carrier transmission depends on all the allocated SBs. Therefore, we propose a novel FD scheduling based on the expected value of cell throughput which is calculated by both the SB selected by the metric as a candidate and the previously allocated SBs. The eNB assigns the candidate SB if the expected cell throughput increases after allocating the candidate SB. Computer simulations confirm that the proposal can improve throughput performances compared to the SB criterion scheduling in the SC-NOMA.