Rethinking Outage Constraints for Resource Management in NOMA Networks

In non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems, the outage is regarded to happen when a user cannot correctly decode the messages for users with higher decoding order and hence cannot perform the successive interference cancelation (SIC). However, in this case, the user may still correctly decode its message by treating the uncanceled signal as interference and avoid the outage. By considering this behavior, the outage probability should be redefined. In this paper, we investigate user scheduling and power allocation for a downlink NOMA system with imperfect SIC by using the alternative outage probability as a constraint. In order to tackle the complicated non-convex resource allocation problem, we propose a two-phase algorithm, in which the user scheduling is first optimized through a matching theory based algorithm, and then power allocation is performed with the aid of the branch and bound technique and the concave-convex procedure method. Simulation results show that the performance of the proposed low-complexity algorithm is near-optimal and the algorithm based on the alternative outage probability outperforms that based on the traditional one when the residual interference from imperfect SIC significantly affects the decoding.