Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation in SWIPT Enabled NOMA Systems

In this paper, we investigate joint power allocation and time switching (TS) control for energy efficiency (EE) optimization in a TS-based simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system. Our aim is to optimize the EE of the system whilst satisfying the constraints on maximum transmit power, minimum data rate and minimum harvested energy per-terminal. The considered EE optimization problem is formulated and then transformed according to the duality of broadcast channels (BC) and multiple access channels (MAC). The corresponding non-linear and non-convex optimization problem, involving joint optimization of power allocation and time switching factor, is difficult to solve directly. In order to tackle this problem, we develop a dual-layer algorithm where a convex programming-based Dinkelbach's method is proposed to optimize the power allocation in the inner-layer and an efficient search method is then applied to optimize the TS factor in the outer-layer. Numerical results validate the theoretical findings and demonstrate that significant performance gain over orthogonal multiple access (OMA) scheme in terms of EE can be achieved by the proposed algorithm in a SWIPT-enabled NOMA system.