Energy Efficiency Maximization in the Uplink Delta-OMA Networks

Delta-orthogonal multiple access (D-OMA) has been recently investigated as a potential technique to enhance the spectral efficiency in the sixth-generation (6G) networks. D-OMA enables partial overlapping of the adjacent sub-channels that are assigned to different clusters of users served by non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), at the expense of additional interference. In this paper, we analyze the performance of D-OMA in the uplink and develop a multi-objective optimization framework to maximize the uplink energy efficiency (EE) in a multi-access point (AP) network enabled by D-OMA. Specifically, we optimize the sub-channel and transmit power allocations of the users as well as the overlapping percentage of the spectrum between the adjacent sub-channels. The formulated problem is a mixed binary non-linear programming problem. Therefore, to address the challenge we first transform the problem into a single-objective problem using Tchebycheff method. Then, we apply the monotonic optimization (MO) to explore the hidden monotonicity of the objective function and constraints, and reformulate the problem into a standard MO in canonical form. The reformulated problem is then solved by applying the outer polyblock approximation method. Our numerical results show that D-OMA outperforms the conventional non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) when the adjacent sub-channel overlap and scheduling are optimized jointly.