Impact of User Pairing on 5G Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how user pairing strategies affect the performance of two NOMA systems in 5G, demonstrating that pairing users with distinct channel conditions enhances sum rate and QoS guarantees.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of F-NOMA and CR-NOMA, highlighting how user pairing impacts sum rate and QoS in 5G NOMA systems.

Findings

F-NOMA achieves higher sum rates than orthogonal MA.

Pairing users with distinct channel conditions improves F-NOMA performance.

CR-NOMA guarantees QoS for users with poor channels and prefers pairing the best with second-best users.

Abstract

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) represents a paradigm shift from conventional orthogonal multiple access (MA) concepts, and has been recognized as one of the key enabling technologies for 5G systems. In this paper, the impact of user pairing on the performance of two NOMA systems, NOMA with fixed power allocation (F-NOMA) and cognitive radio inspired NOMA (CR-NOMA), is characterized. For FNOMA, both analytical and numerical results are provided to demonstrate that F-NOMA can offer a larger sum rate than orthogonal MA, and the performance gain of F-NOMA over conventional MA can be further enlarged by selecting users whose channel conditions are more distinctive. For CR-NOMA, the quality of service (QoS) for users with the poorer channel condition can be guaranteed since the transmit power allocated to other users is constrained following the concept of cognitive radio networks. Because of this constraint, CR-NOMA has different behavior compared to F-NOMA. For example, for the user with the best channel condition, CR-NOMA prefers to pair it with the user with the second best channel condition, whereas the user with the worst channel condition is preferred by F-NOMA.