Efficient Resource Allocation for Wireless-Powered MIMO-NOMA Communications

Wireless-powered communication (WPC) is a promising technology for varied smart network applications in the industrial, commercial, and security sectors. It employs a large number of connected low-powered user equipments (UEs) in which the harvested energy from electromagnetic radiations is used for signal transmission. However, efficient resource allocation schemes are still required to optimize the performance of WPC networks over limited power and spectrum environments. In this paper, a new approach of wireless-powered multiple-input multiple-output non-orthogonal multiple access (WP-MIMO-NOMA) is designed by employing harvest-then-transmit protocol with joint time-split and power control (TS-PC) techniques to optimize the network performance and lifetime with affordable complexity. We derive the sum rate, UEs’ rates, and rate region expressions based on power-domain NOMA and successive interference cancellation (SIC) decoding. An optimal joint TS-PC (OJTS-PC) scheme is proposed to maximize the network sum rate with enhanced user-fairness under constrained harvested energy level, uplink transmit power, and minimum UE’s rate. Besides, a near-optimal greedy TS-PC (GTS-PC) algorithm is designed to reduce computational efforts significantly. For comparison, we derive the rate expressions for the reference WP-MIMO-OMA system based on orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) and time-division multiple access (TDMA). Numerical results validate the effectiveness of proposed resource allocation schemes in terms of realized sum rate, UE’s rate, and user-fairness without scarifying the limited power of far UEs. This will prolong the lifetime of WPC networks operating over constrained power and bandwidth resources.