Effective Capacity Analysis of Delay-Sensitive Communications in NOMA Systems

In physical layer for non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), most existing studies focus on the non-delay-sensitive metrics such as the spectral efficiency. In order to improve user’s quality of service (QoS) in delay-sensitive communications, however, effective capacity can be adopted to the NOMA system to consider the QoS metric while analyzing capacity. In this paper, we deduce the closed form expression for effective capacity in downlink NOMA and propose three optimization problems with delay and effective capacity constraints. Firstly, a joint rate and power allocation scheme is proposed to maximize the total effective capacity. Secondly, we deduce the optimal solution of the problem for maximizing the minimum delay QoS exponent. Thirdly, a minimum total transmit power allocation scheme is proposed with the effective capacity constraint. Since the problems of maximizing effective capacity and minimizing total transmit power are non-convex, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is used to find global optimization solutions. Simulation results show our proposed power and rate allocation scheme maximizes the effective capacity, which is better than orthogonal multiple access (OMA). Meanwhile, the optimal minimum delay QoS exponent and minimum total transmit power with effective capacity constraint have been achieved.