UC Santa Cruz

A non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) approach to user signal power allocation called Fair-NOMA is introduced. Fair-NOMA is the application of NOMA in such a way that two mobile users have the opportunity to always achieve at least the information capacity they can achieve by using orthogonal multiple access (OMA), regardless of the user selection criteria, making it suitable for implementation using any current or future scheduling paradigms. Given this condition, the bounds of the power allocation coefficients are derived as functions of the channel gains of the two mobile users. The NOMA power allocation is analyzed for two scheduled users that are selected randomly with i.i.d. channel gains. The capacity improvements made by each user and the sum capacity improvement are derived.