The Impact of User-Pairing on the Performance of Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) System

Abstract

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is being considered as a candidate to meet the expected traffic demand growth in 5G and beyond 5G (5GB) networks. Due to the complexity of applying multiuser detection at the NOMA receiver, a number of works have suggested applying user-pairing to simplify dealing with all users as a whole. This paper addresses the effect of applying user-pairing on the performance of NOMA assisted system in general proposes three different user pairing approaches to examine which one is best for boosting the performance of multiuser NOMA system and making it reaches its potential. This paper evaluates the performance of NOMA system with organized (uniform), random, and distance-based user pairing schemes. Simulation results show that the organized pairing assisted NOMA scheme offers the best performance as compared to its pairing peer techniques in terms of the overall sum rate and the energy efficiency.