Fairness-aware resource allocation for D2D-enabled IoT in NOMA-based cellular networks with mutual successive interference cancellation

Device-to-device (D2D) communications and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) are promising technologies to meet the growing demand for IoT-connected devices. However, they bring about new challenges including the co-channel interference, that can limit the performance improvement. To manage the co-channel interference, we address the problem of joint power allocation and sub-channel assignment for D2D-enabled IoT devices (IoTDs) underlaying a NOMA-based cellular network, in which the successive interference cancellation (SIC) decoding is enabled at the level of IoTDs and cellular user equipment (CUE)to increase the number of connected devices and the capacity. This problem is modeled as a mixed-integer nonconvex optimization problem which includes the concept of fairness with respect to the data rates of IoTDs. To solve the problem, a semi-distributed algorithm is developed, which is of polynomial time complexity. The proposed algorithm leverages the successive convex approximation and a heuristic approach. Evaluation results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed scheme with respect to the sum rate, fairness, access rate and computational complexity.