IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 68, NO.
9, SEPTEMBER 2019
Correspondence
Spectral- and Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation for
Multi-Carrier Uplink NOMA Systems
Ming Zeng , Nam-Phong Nguyen, Member, IEEE,
Octavia A. Dobre , Senior Member, IEEE,
Zhiguo Ding , Member, IEEE, and H. Vincent Poor , Fellow, IEEE
Abstract—In this paper, resource allocation for a multi-carrier uplink
non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system is studied. Unlike the ex-
isting works on multi-carrier uplink NOMA, in which each user is assumed
to access only one subcarrier, we consider a more general scenario where
the number of subcarriers allocated to a single user is not constrained.
We first aim to maximize the system’s sum rate, which requires selecting
the appropriate subcarriers for each user and distribute the transmission
power. The formulated non-convex problem is transformed into a convex
one, and further, an optimal and low-complexity iterative water-filling
solution is proposed. Nonetheless, it is shown that maximum transmit
power is employed by each user to maximize the sum rate. Motivated by
the fact that the users are power constrained, the energy efficiency (EE)
maximization problem is also studied. Based on fractional programming,
the EE maximization problem is transformed into a series of sum rate max-
imization subproblems, and the proposed iterative water-filling solution
is applied to each subproblem. The proposed schemes are compared with
other NOMA-based and orthogonal multiple access based algorithms, and
its superiority is fully validated.
Index Terms—Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), uplink, multi-
carrier NOMA, resource allocation.
I. INTRODUCTION
Uplink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has attracted con-
siderable attention recently [1]–[10]. Earlier works in uplink NOMA
mainly focused on single-carrier and single-antenna systems [1]–[3]. To
further exploit the potential of NOMA and increase the system capacity,
multi-antenna and multi-carrier technologies have been considered in
[4]–[10]. For multi-carrier NOMA, subcarriers-to-users assignments
directly affect the system performance. In [7], a simple heuristic user
pairing method was proposed, which is shown to outperform its or-
thogonal multiple access (OMA) counterpart. In [8], the user pairing
issue was formulated as a bipartite matching problem by developing the
lower bounds on the achievable rates, and then solved via the Hungarian
method. Note that power allocation (PA) was not considered in the
Manuscript received March 27, 2019; revised May 7, 2019; accepted June 20,
2019. Date of publication July 3, 2019; date of current version September 17,
2019. This work was supported in part by the Natural Sciences and Engineering
Research Council of Canada (NSERC), through its Discovery program, and
in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Grants CCF-0939370
and CCF-1513915. The review of this paper was coordinated by Dr. B. Mao.
(Corresponding author: Octavia A. Dobre.)
M. Zeng and O. A. Dobre are with the Memorial University of Newfoundland,
St. John’s, NF A1B 3X5, Canada (e-mail: mzeng.mun.ca; odobre.mun.ca).
N.-P. Nguyen with the Memorial University of Newfoundland, St.
John’s, NF A1B 3X5, Canada, and is also with Hanoi University of Sci-
ence and Technology, Hanoi 100000, Vietnam (e-mail: nnguyen.mun.ca,
phong.nguyennam@hust.edu.vn).
Z. Ding is with the The University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, U.K.
(e-mail: zhiguo.ding@manchester.ac.uk).
H. V. Poor is with Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544 USA (e-mail:
poor@princeton.edu).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TVT.2019.2926701
0018-9545 © 2019 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
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9293
above two works. This was addressed by [9] and [10]. In [9], the authors
decomposed joint PA and user paring into two separate subproblems.
They first proposed a heuristic user paring scheme, and on this basis,
derived the closed-form PA solution for sum rate maximization. In
contrast, PA and user pairing were jointly handled in [10]. Specifically,
the authors proposed to iteratively update the two parts until the system’s
energy efficiency (EE) converges.
In all above works on multi-carrier NOMA, i.e., [7]–[10], it was
assumed that each user can access a single subcarrier. This is a strong
and unnecessary assumption, since carrier aggregation has been widely
deployed in LTE-A systems and will continue to be used in 5G. To
address this, we consider a more general case when the number of
subcarriers for each user can be arbitrary. The aim of the paper is to
maximize the sum rate and EE for a multi-user and multi-carrier uplink
NOMA system.
For the sum rate maximization problem, the formulated non-convex
problem can be transformed into a convex problem. Moreover, an
iterative water-filling algorithm is proposed, which is optimal and of
low-complexity. This makes it different from the multi-carrier downlink
NOMA systems, in which the sum rate maximization problem has been
shown to be non-deterministic polynomial-time [11], [12]. On the other
hand, the EE maximization problem is of a fractional form, and can be
transformed into a series of parametric subtractive-form subproblems
based on Dinkelbach’s algorithm [13]. Then, the proposed iterative
water-filling algorithm can be applied to solve each subproblem. This
will yield the optimal EE solution. Simulations are conducted, which
show that the proposed schemes outperform other NOMA- and OMA-
based algorithms.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section II introduces the
system model and problem formulation, and Section III presents the
proposed iterative water-filling solution; Sections IV and V study
the EE maximization problem and the OMA baseline, respectively;
Section VI shows the numerical results, while Section VII concludes
the paper.
II. SYSTEM MODEL AND PROBLEM FORMULATION
A. System Model
We consider a multi-carrier uplink system, where the base station
(BS) supports multiple users. Both the BS and users are equipped
with a single antenna. Denote the set of users by K = {1, . . . , K},
and subcarriers by M = {1, . . . , M }. The channel gain between user
i, i ∈ K and the BS on subcarrier j, j ∈ M is denoted by hi,j , which
includes both large-scale pathloss and small-scale Rayleigh fading. It is
assumed that each user can have access to multiple subcarriers, and each
subcarrier can accommodate multiple users through
NOMA. Denote the
power of user i on subcarrier j by Pi,j , satisfying j∈M Pi,j ≤ Pimax ,
where Pimax is the maximum power constraint for user i. Note that for
the uplink NOMA system, any decoding order can be used without
affecting the sum rate [10]. For now, we simply assume that the users
are decoded in an ascending order of their index on each subcarrier,
i.e., user i is decoded earlier than user k, if i < k. We will show later
that the use of different decoding orders does not affect the formulated
problem. Then, the corresponding achievable rate of user i on subcarrier
9294 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 68, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2019

j is given by
 
Pi,j hi,j
Ri,j = log2 1 + K , (1)
k=i+1 Pk,j hk,j + σ 2

where σ 2 denotes the noise power.

B. Problem Formulation
We aim to maximize the sum rate of all users, which can be formu-
lated as follows:

P1 : max Ri,j (2a)
P
i∈K j∈M

s.t. Pi,j ≤ Pimax , ∀i ∈ K (2b)
j∈M

Pi,j ≥ 0, ∀i ∈ K, j ∈ M, (2c)

where P ∈ RK×M denotes the power matrix, while (2b) and (2c) are
the power constraints. Note that we do not introduce a binary variable
for subcarrier association, since this is reflected by the power, i.e., when
Pi,j = 0, user i is not associated with subcarrier j, and vice versa.
Define x+ = max(x, 0). The optimal power allocation is given by
III. SPECTRAL EFFICIENT RESOURCE ALLOCATION   +
 1 k=i Pk,j hk,j + σ 2
Problem P1 is non-convex in its current form. To simplify it, let us Pi,j = − , (6)
first consider subcarrier j, and we have λi ln 2 hi,j
 
  Pi,j hi,j with λi chosen such that the power constraint is met:
Ri,j = log2 1 + K
k=i+1 Pk,j hk,j + σ
2   +
i∈K i∈K  1 Pk,j hk,j + σ 2
   −
k=i
= Pimax . (7)
Pi,j hi,j λi ln 2 hi,j
= log2 1 + i∈K 2 . (3) j∈M
σ
 Clearly, once the values of Pk,j , k = i are given, the above procedure
Since i∈K Pi,j hi,j is the same for any decoding order, we can 
for obtaining Pi,j is exactly the water-filling solution. Denote ti =
conclude that i∈K Ri,j is independent of the decoding order [10].
1/λi . The left part in (7) is a monotonic piecewise linear function over
Now P1 can be reformulated as
   ti , and the value of ti can be easily obtained.
 To obtain the values of Pk,j , k = i, an iterative solution is proposed
i∈K Pi,j hi,j
P2 : max log2 1 + , s.t.(2b), (2c). (4)
P σ2 here. First, we assign an initial value to Pk,j , k = i, and then update
j∈M
Pi,j . Once Pi,j is updated, we can optimize the power for another
Clearly, the objective function in P2 is concave. Moreover, the user by employing the same method. The same procedure repeats until
constraints (2b) and (2c) are affine. Therefore, P2 belongs to a convex convergence, and we can obtain a local optimum. It is worth mentioning
optimization problem, and can be solved using available convex tools that convergence is guaranteed since the sum rate is upper bounded,
[14]. Moreover, it can be seen that the sum rate increases with Pi,j , and it increases or at least remains unchanged after each update of
and
 thus, equality is achieved at (2b) to maximize the sum rate, i.e., power allocation [15]. Moreover, since the original problem is convex,
max
j∈M Pi,j − Pi = 0. On this basis, we propose an optimal and the achieved local optimum is also a global optimum. The specific
low-complexity algorithm based on water-filling as follows: procedure is presented in Algorithm 1. Note that the iterative water-
1) Iterative Water-Filling Algorithm: Consider the Lagrangian filling algorithm has also been used as an efficient approach to solve
   power allocation problems for OMA systems [16].
 Pi,j hi,j 2) Complexity Analysis: Denote the number of iterations by I1 . Then,
L(λi , P) = log2 1 + i∈K 2
j∈M
σ we need to run I1 K times the standard water-filling procedure, each re-
  quiring O(M log2 (M )) operations. Therefore, the overall complexity
  is O(I1 KM log2 (M )).
− λi Pi,j − Pimax , (5)
i∈K j∈M
IV. ENERGY-EFFICIENT RESOURCE ALLOCATION
where
 λi is the Lagrange multiplier, satisfying λi > 0, since
max To maximize the sum rate, each user transmits with full power.
j∈M Pi,j − Pi = 0. The Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions for the
Given that users are power-constrained, we need to consider the EE
optimality of a power allocation is
maximization to balance the sum rate and power consumption. EE is

defined as a ration between the sum rate and the total transmit power,
∂L = 0, if Pi,j > 0,
= which includes both fixed circuit power and dynamic transmit power
∂Pi,j ≤ 0, if Pi,j = 0. [17]–[19]. Denote the overall circuit power of the system by Pf . The

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 68, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2019 9295

V. OMA BASELINE SCHEME

In this section, we discuss the OMA scheme. Here, time division
multiplex access is adopted as an example for OMA.  Denote the time
ratio of user i on subcarrier j by τi,j , satisfying i∈K τi,j = 1, ∀j ∈
M. The achievable rate of user i on subcarrier j is given by
 
OMA Pi,j hi,j
Ri,j = τi,j log2 1 + . (12)
σ2

Then, the sum rate maximization problem is formulated as


OMA
P3 : max Ri,j (13a)
P,τ
i∈K j∈M

s.t. Pi,j ≤ Pimax , ∀i ∈ K, (13b)
j∈M

Pi,j ≥ 0, ∀i ∈ K, j ∈ M, (13c)
EE is given by 
 τi,j = 1, ∀j ∈ M, (13d)
 
 Pi,j hi,j i∈K
j∈M log2 1 + i∈K
σ2
ηEE =   . (8) τi,j ≥ 0, ∀i ∈ K, j ∈ M. (13e)
i∈K j∈M Pi,j + Pf
For problem P3, it can be easily verified that the objective function is
Then, the EE optimization problem can be expressed as
non-concave, due to the coupling of time ratio and power. To address it,
max ηEE , s.t. (2b), (2c). (9) we use alternating optimization to iteratively update the power and time
P
ratio. Under given time ratio values, P3 is clearly a convex optimization
It is clear that (9) belongs to a fractional problem, which can be problem with resepct to (w.r.t.) Pi,j , and can be solved using available
transformed into a series of parametric subtractive-form subproblems convex optimization tools [14]. Likewise, under given power values,
as follows [13]: P3 is a linear programming problem w.r.t. τi,j , and can be efficiently
  
 Pi,j hi,j solved.
max log2 1 + i∈K 2 The specific procedure is as follows: we first assign an initial feasible
P
j∈M
σ
value to each τi,j . Then, we optimize Pi,j using convex optimization
  tools. Following this, we optimize τi,j using linear programming under

(l−1)
−β Pi,j + Pf , s.t. (2b), (2c), (10) the previously obtained Pi,j . This procedure repeats until convergence.
i∈K j∈M Note that convergence is guaranteed since the sum rate always increases
after each update, and it has an upper bound.
where β (l−1) is a non-negative parameter. Starting from β (0) = 0, β (l)
can be updated by
 VI. SIMULATION RESULTS
 
 P
(l)
h
i∈K i,j i,j
j∈M log 2 1 + σ2
In this section, simulations are performed to show the effectiveness
β (l) =   (l)
, of the proposed multi-carrier uplink NOMA schemes. The default
i∈K j∈M Pi,j + Pf simulation parameters are as follows. There are 12 users, which are
uniformly distributed within a radius of 100 m. The pathloss model
(l)
where Pi,j is the updated power after solving (10). As shown in [13], is 30.6 + 36.7 log10 (d), where d is the distance in m. There are 4
β (l) keeps growing as l increases. When β (l) − β (l−1) is smaller than subcarriers, each with 180 kHz bandwidth. The noise power spectral
a certain threshold, e.g., ε = 10−6 , the iterations terminate and the density is −125 dBm/Hz. Rayleigh fading is used for small fading on
attained β (l) gives the maximum EE of (9). each subcarrier. The fixed power consumption for each user is 0 dBm.
Then, the problem lies in how to solve (10) for a given β. It is clear The results are averaged over 100 random trials.
that (10) is similar to the sum rate maximization problem (4), except Regarding the used baseline algorithms, besides the OMA scheme,
for the extra linear part in the objective function. Likewise, we have we also consider two NOMA algorithms. The first one is the scheme in
  + [8], where users are matched with the subcarriers using the Hungarian
k=i Pk,j hk,j + σ
2
 1 algorithm. Once the user-subcarrier matching is done, the sum rate is
Pi,j = − , (11)
(λi + β (l) ) ln 2 hi,j maximized by letting each user transmit at full power, while the EE
maximization can be obtained using the Dinkelbach’s algorithm. This
with the Lagrange multiplier λi satisfying scheme is referred to as NOMA-up, and its complexity is O(I2 K 3 ).
  + The second one is from [10], where an initial user clustering is first
 1 k=i Pk,j hk,j + σ
2
− = Pimax . obtained based on channel gains, and then swap-matching is repeated
j∈M
(λi + β (l) ) ln 2 hi,j until no better sum rate or EE can be achieved. This scheme is referred
to as NOMA-swap, and its complexity is O(K 2 (I3 I2 I1 + M )), where
The specific procedure is summarized in Algorithm 2. Denote I3 denotes the number of iterations for swap matching. The solutions
the number of updating β as I2 . Then, the overall complexity is in [7] and [9] are not shown, since they only apply to cases when users’
O(I2 I1 KM log2 (M )). channel gains remain the same on different subcarriers.

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9296
Fig. 1. Sum rates versus maximum transmit power.
Fig. 2. EE versus maximum transmit power.
Figure 1 shows how the sum rate varies with the maximum transmit
power for the four considered algorithms. It is clear that NOMA-prop
slightly outperforms NOMA-swap and NOMA-up. Moreover, all three
NOMA schemes are much better than the OMA one, which verifies that
NOMA can achieve a higher sum rate than OMA.
Figure 2 plots the variation of the EE with the maximum transmit
power. NOMA-prop still outperforms the three baseline algorithms,
which fully shows its effectiveness. However, now OMA achieves
higher EE than NOMA-swap and NOMA-up, and approaches NOMA-
prop at high P max . This is because OMA allows each user to access
multiple subcarriers, while NOMA-swap and NOMA-up only assigns
a single subcarrier to each user. This multiplexing gain becomes more
dominant than the gain of NOMA over OMA under EE maximization,
since a larger ratio of power is not used for NOMA-swap and NOMA-up
under EE maximization.
VII. CONCLUSION
Optimal power and subcarrier allocation for a multi-user multi-
carrier uplink NOMA system has been studied in this paper. For the
sum rate maximization problem, this was first transformed into a convex
problem, and further, a low-complexity optimal iterative water-filling
algorithm was proposed. Note that maximum transmit power is used
by each user to achieve the maximum sum rate. Considering the fact
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 68, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2019
that users are power-constrained, the EE maximization problem was
also studied. Based on fractional programming, this problem was trans-
formed into a series of sum rate maximization subproblems, each being
handled by the proposed iterative water-filling algorithm. Numerical
results were presented, in which the proposed scheme was compared
with the OMA baseline and two NOMA baseline schemes. It was shown
that the proposed scheme outperforms the three baseline algorithms,
especially in terms of EE. Moreover, under sum rate maximization,
the OMA baseline is worse than the two NOMA baseline algorithms.
However, under EE maximization, the opposite is achieved, which
indicates the importance of allowing each user to access multiple
subcarriers.
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