NOMA for Wireless-Powered Communication Networks With Buffered Sources

To increase the feasibility of wireless powered communication networks (WPCNs), the synergy of efficient multiple access protocols and diverse types of resources, e.g., multiple antennas, memories, and energy storage devices is of paramount importance. To this end, in this paper, we introduce the use of buffered sources in WPCNs with uplink non-orthogonal multiple access, in which a multi-antenna hybrid access point can both transmit energy and receive information. The proposed scheme aims at maximizing the long-term utility function, which is determined by the achieved average data rate and fairness among sources. The formulated long-term time-average optimization problem is converted into instantaneous ones by exploiting the Lyapunov optimization framework. The derived analytical solutions reveal the impact of data buffers’ length on the decoding order of sources’ messages. Finally, it is shown that the proposed scheme achieves superior long-term utility compared to the considered baseline schemes with non-buffered sources and buffered sources with orthogonal multiple access. Additionally, it is demonstrated that our proposed scheme can ensure fairness without reducing the average data rate.