Power Allocation Evaluation for Downlink Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA)

Fifth-generation of wireless cellular systems has the potential to increase capacity, spectral efficiency, and fairness among users. The Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access based wireless networks (NOMA) is the next generation multiplexing technique. NOMA breaks the orthogonality of traditional multiple access to allow multiple users to share the same radio resource simultaneously. The main challenge in designing NOMA is the selection of the resource allocation algorithms since user pairing and power allocation are coupled. This paper compares the performance of three power allocation schemes: fixed power allocation, fractional transmit power allocation and full search power allocation. The algorithms are analyzed in different simulation scenarios using three performance metrics of the spectrum efficiency and energy efficiency and sum rate. Additionally, the impact of user pairing algorithms studied through two user pairing schemes: random user pairing and channel state sorting based user pairing. Results indicate the superiority of NOMA to increase the capacity compared to traditional orthogonal multiple access. On the other hand, full search power allocation is the best performance compared to the other power allocation schemes though it is highly complex compared to fractional transmit power that gives a suboptimal performance.