Resource Allocation for NOMA-based D2D Communications

Supervisor: Prof Michael Chai

Research group(s): Networks

Device-to-device (D2D) communications is considered as one of the pieces of the fifth generation (5G) jigsaw puzzle in order to improve spectral efficiency. Apart from invoking D2D technique to improve the spectral efficiency of the wireless networks, another emerging technique, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is able to address the spectral efficiency enhancement issue, on the standpoint of realising a new power dimension for multiple access. Similar to D2D communications, Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has also been recognised as a promising technique for 5G due to its high spectral efficiency and user fairness. Different from the conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA) technique, NOMA is capable of supporting users to share the same resource (e.g., time/frequency/code) by performing successive interference cancellation (SIC) with different channel state information (CSI). However, perfect CSI is difficult to obtain in practice due to either the estimation error or the feedback delay. This work research into how CSI error affects the performance of NOM-based D2D communications and propose a robust resource allocation under imperfect CSI.