Resource scheduling in non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) based cloud-RAN systems

Cloud radio access network (C-RAN) is enabling innovation which can address a number of challenges that cellular network operators (CNOs) face while trying to support ever growing end users' needs towards 5th generation (5G) of mobile networks. This paper investigates a scheduling problem to enhance the performance of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) based cloud radio access networks (C-RAN). We consider the downlink of a C-RAN where cloud is responsible for the scheduling policy and formulate the scheduling problem. In this paper non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is adopted and resource scheduling techniques in an unconstrained C-RAN networks are proposed. We design an efficient resource scheduling algorithm to assist the resource scheduling process in NOMA based C-RAN systems. We formulate the problem as binary integer programming (BIP) optimization problem and propose a suboptimal BIP algorithm and a greedy heuristic allocation algorithm which leads to the maximization of throughput in terms of sum rate when compared with the standard techniques. Simulation results shows significant performance improvement with the proposed algorithms.