User Association and Power Allocation for Multi-cell Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access Networks

In this paper, user association and power allocation are investigated in a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based multi-cell network. In order to perform successive interference cancellation (SIC) techniques for removing the intra-base station (BS) interference, the optimal decoding order is derived for all users associated with the same BS. In an effort to improve the system, a sum rate maximization problem is formulated by jointly designing user association and power allocation. Two game theory based algorithms are proposed to obtain the stable user structure by dividing users into different BSs’ clusters, where the sub-optimal and global optimal solutions can be achieved. The properties of the proposed algorithms, including complexity, convergence, stability and optimality, are analyzed. Based on the quality-of-service (QoS) constraint, the closed-from solutions for power allocation are derived, and thus the expressions for the sum rate of all users in each cluster is obtained. Moreover, the case that the QoS threshold cannot be achieved by all users in each cluster is considered. Simulation results demonstrate that: i) the proposed user association algorithms and the closed-form solutions for power allocation can significantly enhance the sum rate and outage probability; and ii) the proposed NOMA-based system is capable of achieving promising gains over the conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA)-based framework in the multi-cell scenario.