Resource Allocation for NOMA Based Space-Terrestrial Satellite Networks

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been extensively studied to improve the performance of space-terrestrial satellite networks on account of the shortage of frequency band resources. In this paper, terrestrial network and satellite network synergistically provide complete coverage for ground users. A user association scheme on account of the channel gain and distance between the ground users and the BSs is proposed to identify the users to be associated by the BSs, and there is an upper limit for the number of users associated with each BS. Then calculate the channel condition ratio to select the users served by the satellite. The all BSs provide service for those unselected users, and the NOMA technology is applied to terrestrial network. Then, a user pairing scheme which maximize the minimum the ground user channel correlation coefficient is formulated to match the terrestrial users in a NOMA group. On account of multiple antennas equipped by the BSs and satellite, beamforming is performed among groups of BSs and among satellite users so as to reduce multi-user interference. In the power allocation scheme, we introduce the alternative direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algotithm so as to optimize system energy efficiency. In addition, the objective function is a non-convex function, so the Dinkelbach-style scheme is presented to convert non-convex function into the convex-form function. Eventually, the performance of the presented algorithm is simulated and compared with the existing NOMA-FTPA algorithm. The results indicate that the presented algorithm has high superiority in system energy efficiency and it can be applied to this network.