A Use-It-Or-Lose-It Economic VCG Auction Approach For NOMA Wireless Relay Networks

In Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) wireless networks, base station broadcasts the aggregated contents to all users, where short-distance users have stronger signals compared with long-distance users. Stronger signal users can decode and subtract other weaker users’ signals without interference and thus they can forward packets to weaker users as relay devices for better network utilization. In traditional NOMA, the decoded information is simply subtracted from the superposition coded signal and the devices do not take advantage of the cached content. In this paper, inspired by the use it or lose it concept, we propose an economic auction-based NOMA relay approach. The proposed strategy utilizes Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) auction theory to make the optimal relay-user matching decision based on utility models for base station and relay devices. Through VCG auction, relay devices obtain their maximum utility and user equipment get a better service. Simulation results illustrate the potential performance gain of NOMA relay forwarding with VCG auction mechanism.