A Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access-Based Multicast Scheme in Wireless Content Caching Networks

A key problem of content caching networks is that extra radio resource blocks are consumed to push content objects, which leads to a decline of spectrum efficiency. To solve this problem, a non-orthogonal multiple access-based multicast (NOMA-MC) scheme is proposed in this paper, where pushing and multicasting content objects can be accomplished simultaneously, and thus the spectrum efficiency can be improved significantly. To evaluate the performance of the NOMA-MC scheme, an explicit expression of outage probability is derived, which shows that full diversity gains can be achieved in the single-cell scenario. Moreover, the theoretical results can be extended to the multi-cell scenario by establishing a stochastic geometry-based network model, which show that the NOMA-MC scheme can achieve better performance than the conventional orthogonal multiple access-based multicast scheme. Then, the joint design of power allocation and content matching is studied to enlarge the performance gains of the NOMA-MC scheme, and two distributed optimization algorithms are proposed by solving a hospitals/residents matching problem. Finally, simulation results are provided to verify the analytical results, and also demonstrate the performance gains of the NOMA-MC scheme.