Uplink Scheduling in a NOMA-Enabled Single-Cell Wireless Network Using Simulated Annealing

By allowing multiple users to transmit using the same frequency band at the same time, non-orthogonal mul-tiple access (NOMA) can support more users as compared to orthogonal multiple access (OMA) given a fixed amount of time-frequency resources. In this paper, we study the resource allocation problem in the uplink of a single-cell network when NOMA is enabled, where the maximum completion time of serving all connected users is to be minimized. While such an objective function minimizes the required time to serve uplink users, the resource allocation problem is NP-hard. We propose a serial collaborative optimization framework based on simulated annealing (SA) to search for the optimal user pairing and scheduling solution. Simulation studies show that the proposed algorithm for NOMA scheduling can reduce the maximum completion time by more than 30% when compared against OMA scheduling and random NOMA user clustering.