Downlink Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) in Poisson Networks

A network model is considered where Poisson distributed base stations transmit to $N$ power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) users (UEs) each {that employ successive interference cancellation (SIC) for decoding}. We propose three models for the clustering of NOMA UEs and consider two different ordering techniques for the NOMA UEs: mean signal power-based and instantaneous signal-to-intercell-interference-and-noise-ratio-based. For each technique, we present a signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio analysis for the coverage of the typical UE. We plot the rate region for the two-user case and show that neither ordering technique is consistently superior to the other. We propose two efficient algorithms for finding a feasible resource allocation that maximize the cell sum rate $\mathcal{R}_{\rm tot}$, for general $N$, constrained to: 1) a minimum throughput $\mathcal{T}$ for each UE, 2) identical throughput for all UEs. We show the existence of: 1) an optimum $N$ that maximizes the constrained $\mathcal{R}_{\rm tot}$ given a set of network parameters, 2) a critical SIC level necessary for NOMA to outperform orthogonal multiple access. The results highlight the importance in choosing the network parameters $N$, the constraints, and the ordering technique to balance the $\mathcal{R}_{\rm tot}$ and fairness requirements. We also show that interference-aware UE clustering can significantly improve performance.