Throughput fairness trade-offs for downlink non-orthogonal multiple access systems in 5G networks

In this work, user pairing and power allocation are proposed as a hybrid scheme to maximise throughput and achieve system fairness in the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system in 5G networks. The proposed approach is designed to improve the throughput and fairness performance of the downlink NOMA system in 5G networks. User pairing and power allocation schemes are separated to reduce resource allocation complexity. Integer linear programming is applied to perform user pairing, and particle swarm optimisation is used for power allocation. Moreover, the optimisation problem is formulated by converting multi-objective functions into a single function using the scalarisation of multi-objective optimisation problems, and the penalty function is used to prevent optimisation from violating the power, fairness, and data rate constraints. Simulation results show that the proposed model outperforms the conventional numerical approach by at least 9% of throughput maximisation and achieves an acceptable fairness rate.