Joint power and subchannel allocation regarding energy harvesting in MC-NOMA based wireless networks

We propose resource allocation schemes for a multi-carrier non-orthogonal multiple access (MC-NOMA) system with the consideration of energy harvesting. The resource allocation schemes includes an optimization scheme for maximizing the total system capacity, and an optimization scheme for maximizing the fairness among users, such that both schemes guarantee minimum data rate and harvested energy to each user. Because NOMA is one of the key technologies for enhancing system capacity, we apply a NOMA scheme to an Energy Harvesting Wireless Network (EHWN) to increase the capacity whilst at the same time supplying sufficient harvested energy and data rate for each user. The proposed resource allocation schemes are based on a block coordinate descent (BCD) algorithm that can effectively solve problems in which the objective function is not jointly concave. The performance of each proposed scheme is evaluated using simulations, and we show that the capacity maximization and fairness schemes outperform orthogonal multiple access (OMA) schemes in terms of capacity and fairness, respectively. (c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of The Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).