A Study on the Optimality of Downlink Hybrid NOMA

The key idea of hybrid non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is to allow users to use the bandwidth resources to which they cannot have access in orthogonal multiple access (OMA) based legacy networks while still guaranteeing its compatibility with the legacy network. However, in a conventional hybrid NOMA downlink network, some users have access to more bandwidth resources than others, which leads to a potential performance loss. So what if the users can access the same amount of bandwidth resources? This letter focuses on a simple two-user scenario, and develops analytical and simulation results to reveal that for this considered scenario, conventional hybrid NOMA is still an optimal transmission strategy.