Novel Many-to-Many NOMA-based Communication Protocols for Vehicular Platoons

TL;DR

This paper introduces novel many-to-many NOMA communication protocols for vehicular platoons, enhancing spectral efficiency and reducing latency in VANETs through innovative clustering, power allocation, and super-cluster formation techniques.

Contribution

It proposes new uplink, downlink, and joint NOMA schemes for vehicular networks, along with clustering and resource management strategies that improve network sum rate.

Findings

UDM-NOMA outperforms OMA by up to 50% in sum rate.

Proposed algorithms achieve near-optimal performance with reduced SIC overhead.

The schemes are effective even with SIC errors up to 10%.

Abstract

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a promising technique for ultra-reliable low-latency communication as it provides higher spectral efficiency and lower latency. In this work, we propose novel many-to-many (M2M) NOMA-based schemes to exchange broadcast, multicast, and unicast messages between cluster heads (CHs) of vehicular platoons. Specifically, we design uplink-M2M-NOMA (UM-NOMA), downlink-M2M-NOMA (DM-NOMA) and joint uplink-downlink-M2M-NOMA (UDM-NOMA) schemes for peer-to-peer vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). We propose a unique clustering design for full-duplex communication that utilizes the high throughput millimeter-wave (mmWave) channels. Furthermore, we investigate jointly optimal CH selection (CHS) and power allocation (PA) to maximize the network sum rate and devise a computationally efficient tailored-greedy algorithm that yields near-optimal performance. We also propose a super-cluster formation protocol to further limit the overhead of successive interference cancellation (SIC). The results reveal that in most of the considered scenarios, the proposed UDM-NOMA scheme outperforms orthogonal multiple access (OMA) in terms of sum rate by up to 50% even when the SIC receiver errors reach 10%.