Fairness-Aware Energy-Efficient Power Allocation for Uplink NOMA Systems With Imperfect SIC

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a promising technology for the next generation of wireless networks. However, maximizing energy efficiency (EE) for NOMA systems may cause unbearable near-far unfairness. In this letter, a novel fairness-aware energy-efficient power allocation for uplink NOMA systems with imperfect successive interference cancellation (SIC) is proposed. We first introduce a new metric called geometric energy efficiency (GEE), then a dynamic power allocation scheme is developed by maximizing the GEE. Numerical results show that the proposed power allocation scheme achieves at least a 15.1% EE gain over benchmarks while also providing better or comparable fairness performance.