Optimal User Pairing for Achieving Rate Fairness in Downlink NOMA Networks

In this paper, a downlink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) network is studied. We investigate the problem of jointly optimizing user pairing and beam-forming design to maximize the minimum rate among all users. The considered problem belongs to a difficult class of mixed-integer nonconvex optimization programming. We first relax the binary constraints and adopt sequential convex approximation method to solve the relaxed problem, which is guaranteed to converge at least to a locally optimal solution. Numerical results show that the proposed method attains higher rate fairness among users, compared with traditional beamforming solutions, i.e., random pairing NOMA and beamforming systems.