Spectral-Energy Efficiency Trade-Off Based Design for Hybrid TDMA-NOMA System

The combination of time division multiple access (TDMA) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), referred to as hybrid TDMA-NOMA system, is considered as a potential solution to meet the unprecedented requirements for future wireless networks. While recent resource allocation techniques aiming to individually maximize either spectral efficiency (SE) or energy efficiency (EE), this paper considers an SE-EE trade-off based technique for a hybrid TDMA-NOMA system. This design offers an additional degree of freedom in resource allocation. The proposed design is formulated as a non-convex multi-objective optimization (MOO) problem. The MOO framework is reformulated as a single-objective optimization (SOO) problem by combining the multi-objectives through a weighted-sum objective function. With this, each of the original objectives is assigned with a weight factor to reflect its importance in the design. Then, the sequential convex approximation (SCA) and a second-order cone (SOC) approach are jointly utilized to deal with the non-convexity issues of the SOO problem. Simulation results reveal that the proposed trade-off based design strikes a good balance between the objective functions, while meeting the instantaneous requirements of the system.