Mean-Field Transmission Power Control in Dense Networks, Part II -- Social Welfare Evaluation

TL;DR

This paper evaluates how NOMA protocol improves social welfare and fairness in uplink power control among massive users in dense networks, outperforming CDMA in efficiency and equitable data rate distribution.

Contribution

It demonstrates that NOMA, within a mean-field game framework, enhances social welfare and fairness compared to CDMA in non-cooperative uplink power control.

Findings

NOMA achieves higher social welfare than CDMA under equilibrium strategies.

Numerical results show NOMA improves fairness of data rates among users.

Simulation confirms NOMA's superiority in dense network scenarios.

Abstract

We consider uplink power control in wireless communication when massive users compete over the channel resources. In Part I, we have formulated massive transmission power control contest in a mean-field game framework. In this part, our goal is to investigate whether the power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) protocol can regulate the non-cooperative channel access behaviors, i.e., steering the competition among the non-cooperative users in a direction with improved efficiency and fairness. It is compared with the CDMA protocol, which drives each user to fiercely compete against the population, hence the efficiency of channel usage is sacrificed. The existence and uniqueness of an equilibrium strategy under CDMA and NOMA have already been characterized in Part I. In this paper, we adopt the social welfare of the population as the performance metric, which is defined as the expectation of utility over the distribution of different types of channel users. It is shown that under the corresponding equilibrium strategies, NOMA outperforms CDMA in the social welfare achieved, which is illustrated through simulation with different unit price for power consumption. Moreover, it can be observed from numerical results that NOMA can improve the fairness of the achieved data rates among different users.