Effective Throughput Maximization of NOMA With Practical Modulations

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been considered as a promising technology for future wireless communications. In most of the existing NOMA schemes, the ideal information rate based on Shannon capacity is used as the performance metric, assuming perfect successive interference cancellation (SIC) and Gaussian transmit signals without considering practical modulations. The implicit assumptions and the resulting schemes may lead to suboptimal performance in practical NOMA systems. In this paper, we consider multi-user multi-channel NOMA systems using practical quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) with imperfect SIC. We aim to maximize a more practical performance metric, namely the
effective throughput
, which takes into account the data rate and error performance. To achieve this goal, we derive both the exact and approximate expressions of the effective throughput. We also formulate a joint resource optimization problem of the power allocation, channel assignment, and modulation selection to maximize the effective throughput. We develop an efficient power allocation solution by proposing a closed-form power allocation within channels and a waterfilling-form power budget allocation among channels. We also develop efficient channel assignment and modulation selection methods with the aid of matching theory and machine learning, respectively. Consequently, we provide an efficient joint resource allocation algorithm via iterative optimization to maximize the effective throughput. Numerical results are presented to verify the superiority of the proposed NOMA scheme over orthogonal multiple access (OMA) and other NOMA schemes.