Resource Optimization in Multi-cell NOMA

Optimizing non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in multi-cell scenarios is much more challenging than the singlecell case because inter-cell interference must be considered. Most papers addressing NOMA consider a single cell. We take a significant step of analyzing NOMA in multi-cell scenarios. We explore the potential of NOMA networks in achieving optimal resource utilization with arbitrary topologies. Towards this goal, we investigate a broad class of problems. Namely, any problem consisting in optimizing power allocation and user pairing in NOMA with a cost function that is monotonically increasing in time-frequency resource consumption, falls into our problem class. We propose an algorithm that solves the problems optimally with fast convergence. Numerically, we evaluate and demonstrate the performance of NOMA for multi-cell scenarios in terms of resource efficiency and load balancing.