A Novel Low Computational Complexity Power Assignment Method for Non-orthogonal Multiple Access Systems

Multiple access (MA) technology is of most importance for beyond long term evolution (LTE) system. Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) utilizing power domain and advanced receiver has been considered as a candidate MA technology recently. In this paper, power assignment method, which plays a key role in performance of NOMA, is investigated. The power assignment on the basis of maximizing geometric mean user throughput requires exhaustive search and thus has an unacceptable computational complexity for practical systems. To solve this problem, a novel power assignment method is proposed by exploiting tree search and characteristic of serial interference cancellation (SIC) receiver. The proposed method achieves the same performance as the exhaustive search while greatly reduces the computational complexity. On the basis of the proposed power assignment method, the performance of NOMA is investigated by link-level and system-level simulations in order to provide insight into suitability of using NOMA for future MA. Simulation results verify effectiveness of the proposed power assignment method and show NOMA is a very promising MA technology for beyond LTE system.