A Novel Resource Allocation Scheme in NOMA-Based Cellular Network with D2D Communications

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has become a promising technology for 5G. With the support of effective resource allocation algorithms, it can improve the spectrum resource utilization and system throughput. In this article, a new resource allocation algorithm in the NOMA-enhanced cellular network with device-to-device (D2D) communications is proposed, in which we use two new searching methods and an optimal link selection scheme to maximize the system throughput and limit the interferences of the NOMA-based cellular network. In the proposed joint user scheduling, tree-based search power allocation and link selection algorithm, we simplify the solving process of previous methods and set up the optimization function, which does not need to be derivable. With successive interference cancellation (SIC) technology, we give conditions for the D2D devices accessing into the network. We also propose a suboptimal scheme to schedule cellular users and D2D devices into multiple subchannels, which reduces the complexity of the exhaustive search method. Through consistent tree-based searching for the power allocation coefficients, we can get the maximum arithmetic average of the system sum rate. Meanwhile, for the existence of the part of interferences from larger power users which can be canceled by the SIC in NOMA systems, the search options are decreased for increasing the search rate of the power allocation algorithm. Moreover, we propose a distance-aware link selection scheme to guarantee the quality of communications. In summary, the proposed algorithm can improve the system throughput, has a low complexity cost and potentially increases spectral utilization. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves a higher data transmission rate than some of the traditional methods and we also investigate the convergence and the computational complexity cost of the joint algorithm.