Fairness for Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access in 5G Systems

In non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) downlink, multiple data flows are superimposed in the power domain and user decoding is based on successive interference cancellation. NOMA’s performance highly depends on the power split among the data flows and the associated power allocation (PA) problem. In this letter, we study NOMA from a fairness standpoint and we investigate PA techniques that ensure fairness for the downlink users under i) instantaneous channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter, and ii) average CSI. Although the formulated problems are non-convex, we have developed low-complexity polynomial algorithms that yield the optimal solution in both cases considered.