Coordinated Non-Orthogonal Mulitple Access
(CO-NOMA)
Anthony Beylerian
Graduate School of Science and Technology,
Keio University,
Yokohama, Japan
anthonybeylerian@ohtsuki.ics.keio.ac.jp
Abstract—We propose a Coordinated Non-Orthogonal Mul-
tiple Access (CO-NOMA) scheme for resource allocation in the
context of mobile networks. NOMA refers to schemes where mul-
tiple users can access the wireless channel in the same frequency
band simultaneously. In this study, we consider NOMA with
power domain multiplexing, where the near-far property in space
is exploited through appropriate power allocations. Moreover, the
space domain is further exploited by coordinating transmissions
from several distributed radio units. This approach, known as
Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP), can complement NOMA in
order to further make use of the available degrees of freedom.
Therefore, we discuss and propose a suboptimal scheduling
strategy that achieves NOMA with coordinated transmitters in
the downlink, with linear complexity, and compare performances
with other schemes. The proposed scheme is shown to enhance
performances for low to medium number of users per cell, as
observed from system level simulations.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Resource allocation for the wireless interface is a core
task that is continuously improved, in order to be able to
provide mobile network users with a pleasing user expe-
rience. The multiple access and allocation policies directly
affect the performances experienced on the wireless network
and represent the main pivoting point between the different
generations. Conventional solutions adopt policies based on
the orthogonality of resources in either time, code or fre-
quency domains (i.e. TDMA, CDMA, OFDMA). In recent
work, NOMA [1] was proposed as a way to improve on
these solutions through allocating resources non-orthogonally,
and consequently improving the overall network capacity.
As stated in [2], NOMA can be mainly achieved by either
power domain (PD) or code-domain (CD) multiplexing. Due
to complexity constraints, PD multiplexing combined with
successive interference cancellation (SIC) at the receiver is
preferred and has been recently receiving larger interests as it
is also currently under the standardization process [3].
In PD NOMA, we make use of the near-far property.
This means that users that experience higher channel gains,
appearing “near” the transmitter, in the downlink, can be
allocated a lower transmit power than those experiencing lower
channel gains, while still satisfying performance requirements.
This property allows us to multiplex in the power domain
different user streams, at the same time, and in the same
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Tomoaki Ohtsuki
Department of Information and Computer Science,
Faculty of Science and Technology, Keio University,
Yokohama, Japan
ohtsuki@ics.keio.ac.jp
Fig. 1: CO-NOMA on one sub-band.
frequency block, as long as we can separate and decode each
stream at the receivers, typically via a SIC decoder [4].
On the other hand, several studies on CoMP [5] have
shown that performance improvements are possible through
distributed space diversity, particularly in the downlink, where
multiple remote radio units (RRU) transmit to respective users
simultaneously. CoMP can also help solve performance degra-
dation issues, and user fairness can be achieved with adequate
policies [6]. It is therefore interesting to combine both CoMP
and NOMA concepts to benefit from the available degrees
of freedom. Effectively, we discuss how Coordinated NOMA
(CO-NOMA) can achieve this from a resource allocation
perspective and propose a scheme that scales linearly with
the number of users.
II. R ELATED W ORKS
There are many studies in the literature related to both
strategies (CoMP and NOMA). CoMP has been heavily re-
searched in its several aspects [5]. Howeover, over the recent
years, NOMA has received a large amount of attention from
many researchers leading to many interesting studies such as
work by the authors of [1] and [7]. Researchers have also
studied the fairness in resource allocation for NOMA such
as in [8], while others have also proposed switching schemes
between OMA and NOMA [9]. However, few authors discuss
leveraging NOMA in a coordinated context. We therefore
argue that it would be worthwhile to investigate access and
allocation policies for such a strategy.
 III. R ESOURCE A LLOCATION FOR CO-NOMA
Resource allocation is performed at periodic scheduling
intervals, in order to allocate available resources such as power
and frequency blocks to the network’s active users. We denote
by 𝑈 (𝜓) being the set of active users, connected to the 𝜓 𝑡ℎ
RRU. We consider one antenna per network point (RRU/user),
having the same transmit power, operating on the same system
bandwidth and assume perfect channel estimations. In the fol-
lowing subsections, we discuss the proposed approach incre-
mentally starting from standard orthogonal schemes, moving
on to non-orthogonal and coordinated schemes.
A. Non-Coordinated Orthogonal Scheduling
In conventional OMA scheduling, only one active user 𝑢
is scheduled per resource block (RB) 𝑓 from the available
frequency block set 𝐹 . It is assumed that we have a resource
map 𝑀𝑡 (𝜓, 𝑓 ), mapping an RB 𝑓 to an active user 𝑢 (non-
empty buffer), whenever 𝑢 is allocated 𝑓 at scheduling time 𝑡
on RRU 𝜓. Typically, the allocation policy would be aiming
to optimize a target objective. For example, the objective
can be derived from proportional fairness (PF) or Quality of
Service/Experience metrics, and updated by user reports.
In non-coordinated scheduling, the task can be easily dis-
tributed per RRU. Indeed, for a distributed architecture, the
policy can be run locally per RRU 𝜓 as well as in parallel per
RB 𝑓 . Although the optimal allocation solution would be to
find the best user/RB combinations, it would be more difficult
to parallelize as we would have to search the user values on
all RBs. For practical purposes, sub-optimal approaches where
the allocation policy is run separately per RB, keep a low
scheduling runtime and are parallelizable. As for a centralized
architecture, such as cloud-RAN, where RRUs and their base
band unit (BBUs) are virtualized, we can have independent
parallel scheduling tasks per virtual RRU per RB. With this
in mind, let 𝜙(𝜓, 𝑓, 𝑢) represent the frequency domain (FD)
objective metric. The resource allocation policy in its simplest
form can be written as follows:
𝑀𝑡 (𝜓, 𝑓 ) = arg max 𝜙𝑡 (𝜓, 𝑓, 𝑢). (1)
𝑢∈𝑈 (𝜓)
For example, 𝜙 can be defined as :
{ Then, considering the deliberate intra-band interference
1, if u ∈
/ 𝑀𝑡−1 (𝜓, 𝑓 ),
𝜙𝑡 (𝜓, 𝑓, 𝑢) = ˆ 𝑡 (𝜓,𝑓,𝑢)
𝑅 (2)
𝑅𝑡 (𝜓,𝑢)
, otherwise,
with 𝑅ˆ 𝑡 the instantaneous estimated user data rate and 𝑅𝑡 the
long term averaged rate similarly defined in [6].
With this policy, for each RRU 𝜓 and each frequency RB
𝑓 , we pick the optimal user maximizing the objective 𝜙. We
consider that evaluating each objective metric can be done in
constant time 𝑐𝜙 . If we define the complexity as the number of
evaluations that we have to run, in order to reach a decision
to allocate the block 𝑓 , this policy is then of linear order
𝑂(𝑐𝜙 ∣𝑈 (𝜓)∣). This is because we consider that we use linear
scans, searching for maxima (going through all the users).
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Naturally, this policy can be easily extended to support
frequency resource block groups (RBG) instead of RBs. This
will decrease the user feedback granularity at the cost of
coarser frequency selectivity. Typically time-domain (TD)
metrics with QoS/QoE considerations could also be used, at
the cost of additional complexity. However, for conciseness,
our investigation focuses on FD based policies.
On the other hand, in the power domain (PD), we have to
decide on how the power will be distributed across sub-bands.
Although a water-filling technique can be used, it comes at
the cost of extra complexity and more difficult parallelization.
Herein, we assume a static power profile across RBs, where in
all cases we assume that the maximum power is split evenly
per active RB 𝑓 from the operating set of sub-bands 𝐹 (𝜓),
following:
𝑃𝑇 (𝜓)
𝑃𝑇 (𝜓, 𝑓 ) = . (3)
∣𝐹 (𝜓)∣
B. Non-Coordinated Non-Orthogonal Scheduling
For NOMA, at any scheduling time, multiple users can
be served by a certain RRU per frequency block. A RB
𝑓 is saturated (full) at 𝜓, when the maximum supported
number of users 𝜇𝑚𝑎𝑥 have been allocated 𝑓 . Conditions to
allocate multiple users on the same RB are related to SIC
decoding [4], which works iteratively and introduces power
constraints between the multiplexed users. In fact, to decode
streams successfully at all receivers, we need to ensure that
the power level allocated to each multiplexed user is feasible.
Consequently, if we represent the power level as 𝑃 (𝜓, 𝑓, 𝑢)
with maximum RRU power per RB 𝑃𝑇 (𝜓, 𝑓 ), we would first
have the general constraint:
∑
𝑃𝑡 (𝜓, 𝑓, 𝑢) ≤ 𝑃𝑇 (𝜓, 𝑓 ). (4)
𝑢
Otherwise, the typical approach for power allocation is to
assign different ratios of the total power to each user :
𝑃𝑡 (𝜓, 𝑓, 𝑢) = 𝛽𝑡 (𝜓, 𝑓, 𝑢) × 𝑃𝑇 (𝜓, 𝑓 ), (5)
∑𝜇(𝜓,𝑓 )
such that 𝑖=1 𝛽𝑡 (𝜓, 𝑓, 𝑢𝑖 ) ≤ 1, following the constraint
(4), with 𝑢𝑖 being the 𝑖𝑡ℎ multiplexed user on the RB 𝑓 and
𝜇(𝜓, 𝑓 ) the actual total number of users multiplexed.
caused by PD multiplexing, and assuming that the channel
gains are ordered as ∣ℎ𝑡 (𝜓, 𝑓, 𝑢𝑖 )∣ < ∣ℎ𝑡 (𝜓, 𝑓, 𝑢𝑖+1 )∣, we
would have the second constraint :
𝛽𝑡 (𝜓, 𝑓, 𝑢𝑖 ) ≥ 𝛽𝑡 (𝜓, 𝑓, 𝑢𝑖+1 ), (6)
following the near-far property.
Moreover, the post-processing SINR at user 𝑢𝑖 in the SIC
chain after cancellation becomes :
𝛽(𝜓, 𝑓, 𝑢𝑖 )
𝑆𝐼𝑁 𝑅† (𝜓, 𝑓, 𝑢𝑖 ) = ∑𝜇(𝜓,𝑓 ) , (7)
𝑗=𝑖+1 𝛽(𝜓, 𝑓, 𝑢𝑗 ) + 𝜂(𝜓, 𝑓, 𝑢𝑖 )
where the inter-cell interference and noise term divided by the
2
received power is 𝜂(𝜓, 𝑓, 𝑢𝑖 ) = ∣ℎ(𝜓,𝑓,𝑢𝑖𝜎)∣2 𝑃𝑇 (𝜓,𝑓 ) .
 𝑆𝐼𝑁 𝑅† should be higher than the threshold required to
decode the user’s signal with the lowest MCS rate as described
in [10]. Effectively, the optimal solution for this allocation
policy would be to search all the combinations, in the so-called
full search power allocation (FSPA), but the search space for
this is too large, making it impractical. In order to decrease
the complexity, approaches such as fixed power allocation
(FPA) [7], fractional transmit power allocation (FTPA) [7],
tree search transmit power allocation (TTPA) [11] and user
pair power allocation (UPPA) [10] were previously proposed.
In the proposed strategies, we would need to select the best
set of users to finally allocate the power to, per sub-band in
our case. A full search for this task is prohibitive when the
number of users is large, since even for the simplest case where
we choose to select only up to a pair of users from ( the ) total
∑2 ∣𝑈 (𝜓)∣
set 𝑈 (𝜓), we will have to evaluate up to 𝑛=1 = represents all the active users associated to a cluster 𝑐, the
𝑛
(∣𝑈 (𝜓)∣2 + ∣𝑈 (𝜓)∣)/2 subsets per RB per RRU.
Because of this, authors in [10] devised a two step strategy
to reduce the search to pair-wise comparisons, further reduced
by around 15% when considering pairing prerequisites. Al-
though it would be interesting to extend the closed formed
solution in [10] for larger sets, the practical maximum number
of multiplexed users in PD NOMA is limited (typically a pair).
In fact, authors in [12], show that a large enough propagation
loss difference is required for candidate users in order to
achieve practical gains, which would limit possibilities to
multiplex more users.
A suboptimal way that can be done linearly but still achieve
improvements would be to first find the best two users max-
imizing the objective metric 𝜙, while still verifying that their
SINR is higher than the minimum threshold for the lowest
MCS coding rate. This can be done with linear complexity by
comparing and evaluating each user’s metric and SINR.
After finding these two users, we can then evaluate if they
can be paired and find their optimal ratios following the same
procedure as in [10]. In the case where they can’t be paired,
the user with the highest metric is allocated the entire power as
in the OMA strategy. This is suboptimal since the users with
the highest metric are not always possible to pair, however
in the case when it is possible, it will be beneficial. If we
consider that the prerequisite checks and comparisons with
the two metrics in the solution set takes a constant time 𝑐𝑒𝑣𝑎𝑙 ,
the complexity will be in the order of 𝑂((𝑐𝜙 + 𝑐𝑒𝑣𝑎𝑙 )∣𝑈 (𝜓)∣).
C. Coordinated Orthogonal Scheduling
In this study, this approach is referred to as Coordinated
Orthogonal Multiple Access (CO-OMA). With coordination,
multiple RRUs transmit to the same user simultaneously on
the same RB 𝑓 . There are different approaches to do this in
CoMP. However in this study we consider the simpler case
of single-user joint-transmission (SU-JT), where RRUs jointly
transmit the same user signal. Subsequently, since several RRU
are simultaneously involved, the policy will highly depend on
the RRU clustering mechanism used.
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1) Non User-Centric Clusters: In the first case, if the RRU
clusters are either fixed or dynamic but not user-centric [13],
we can distribute/parallelize the scheduling task following
those clusters, and subsequently per frequency block 𝑓 in each
cluster. If we assume that for each user, we have an association
with a RRU cluster 𝐶(𝑢), ( we will
) have to perform a search
𝐶(𝑢)
in the sets 𝜅(𝑢) = ∪𝐾 𝑛=1 , comprised of combinations
𝑛
of up to 𝐾 RRUs from the candidate set. 𝐾 must remain
small (i.e. 2, 3), since users must report back only a limited
number of measurements, to avoid control plane overhead, and
due to the the fact that larger clusters may not always yield
significant benefits [13]. With this in mind, we can limit the
maximum cluster size to(𝐾, )making the RRU set selection in
∑𝐾 𝐾
the order of 𝑂( 𝑛=1 𝑛 ) = 𝑂(𝐾2(𝐾−1) − 1). If 𝑈 (𝑐)
𝑛
minimal coordinated scheduling policy can be written as:
∏
(ˆ
𝑢𝑡 , Ψ̂𝑡 ) = arg max 𝜙𝑡 (𝜓, 𝑓, 𝑢), (8)
𝑢∈𝑈 (𝑐),Ψ𝑡 ∈𝜅(𝑢) 𝜓∈Ψ𝑡
ˆ 𝑓) = 𝑢
𝑀𝑡 (𝜓, ˆ𝑡 , ∀𝜓ˆ ∈ Ψ̂𝑡 . (9)
In other words, we allocate the RB 𝑓 to the optimal
user/sub-cluster combinations maximizing a cluster metric.
This policy would then have complexity in the order of
𝑂((𝐾2(𝐾−1) − 1)𝑐𝜙 ∣𝑈 (𝑐)∣) per cluster, per RB.
2) User-Centric Clusters: As for user-centric clusters, the
complexity increases since each user reports his own cluster,
thus grouping users into separate sets for parallelization is not
straightforward. Also, user-centric clustering is only feasible
in a centralized architecture where the central unit constructs
a global (or regional) connectivity graph. This means it would
be desirable to parallelize the scheduling task on several
threads instead of distributing it per cluster (such as with fixed
clusters). Therefore, analyzing the network graph could help us
derive properties of groups that can be used for parallelization.
We can notice useful connectivity patterns emerging from
simulations, as can be visually observed in the clustering
simulation shown in Fig. 2. In this simulation, the clustering
process is based on the strongest relative reference signal (RS).
This means that a user’s cluster is formed from the RRUs for
which the estimated RS SIR is larger than 𝜖 × 𝑆𝐼𝑅𝑙𝑎𝑟𝑔𝑒𝑠𝑡 ,
where 𝜖 is a scaling factor. The green edges in the figure are
user-RRU associations whereas the red edges represent the
major (largest) chosen RRU clusters.
If we define a community as the set of users connected to
the same cluster or a sub-cluster of the largest RRU cluster,
several groups of users will belong to the same community.
These user communities can then be scheduled together as
allocations would not overlap (no mixed RRU sets). Although
updating the connectivity graph introduces more complexity in
the process, it can be manageable considering that clustering
can be run separately and does not need to update at the
same frequency as the scheduling process, but on a larger time
period. For evaluations, we use fixed clusters for simplicity.

Fig. 2: Cluster communities.
D. Coordinated Non-Orthogonal Scheduling
In the CO-NOMA scenario, we have to consider the
perspectives from the previous two scenarios. This means
evaluating both (sub-)cluster selection metrics as well as PD
user allocation constraints. The optimal solution would involve
finding the combination of radio units, user sets and power
ratios, again per RB. Obviously for a full search, the solution
space is exorbitantly large, however we can combine the
previously discussed strategies to decrease the complexity. It is
however more difficult to find the optimal channel ratios in this
case since we need different power ratios for the same user.
In this situation, we have to take the different channel values
into consideration, since the received signal is a superposition
of the transmissions from the coordinating RRUs.
In SU-JT, from the point of view of the user, the useful re-
ceived power
∑ would consist of the sum of the different received
powers 𝜓𝑖 ∈Ψ̂ 𝑃 (𝜓𝑖 , 𝑓, 𝑢) × ∣ℎ(𝜓𝑖 , 𝑓, 𝑢)∣2 . Therefore, if we
use the notion of fractionally allocating the power, such as in
FTPA, the power ratios can be constructed in an inversely pro-
portional fashion to the effect of their corresponding channel
values on the received power. For example, in the simplest case
illustrated in Fig.3 with two coordinating RRUs 𝜓1 and 𝜓2 to
serve up to two NOMA users 𝑢1 and 𝑢2 , we have the channel
values ℎ(𝜓1 , 𝑓, 𝑢1 ), ℎ(𝜓1 , 𝑓, 𝑢2 ), ℎ(𝜓2 , 𝑓, 𝑢1 ), ℎ(𝜓2 , 𝑓, 𝑢2 ).
Simplifying the notation we write ℎ𝑗𝑖 as the corresponding
channels between an RRU 𝜓𝑖 and a user 𝑢𝑗 illustrated in Fig.3.
Subsequently, the suboptimal fractional power ratios at both
𝜓1 and 𝜓2 for user 𝑢1 can be found following:
∣ℎ11 ∣−𝛼
∣ℎ11 ∣−𝛼 +∣ℎ12 ∣−𝛼
𝛽(𝜓1,2 , 𝑓, 𝑢1 ) =
∣ℎ11 ∣−𝛼 ∣ℎ21 ∣−𝛼
∣ℎ11 ∣−𝛼 +∣ℎ12 ∣−𝛼
+ ∣ℎ21 ∣−𝛼 +∣ℎ22 ∣−𝛼
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Fig. 3: Minimal CO-NOMA connectivity graph.
and its complement at both RRUs will be 𝛽(𝜓1,2 , 𝑓, 𝑢2 ) =
1 − 𝛽(𝜓1,2 , 𝑓, 𝑢1 ). The intuition behind (10), is that the larger
fraction represents proportion to ultimately allocate to user 𝑢1 ,
from the total power to allocate to both users, and the smaller
fractions are to consider the fact that this power originates
from one of the two RRUs.
The exponent term 𝛼 is an optimization term, which can
control the behavior of the power allocation as in FTPA [7].
In order to speed up the computations, we can use 𝛼 = 1,
and although it may not be the optimal value, the approach
would still yield improvements as shown in our simulations.
Similarly in this case, if we consider the complexity to evaluate
the pairing prerequisites and power allocation in constant time,
the worst case allocation complexity will be upper bounded
by 𝑂((𝐾2(𝐾−1) − 1)(𝑐𝜙 + 𝑐𝑒𝑣𝑎𝑙 )∣𝑈 (𝑐)∣) per cluster per RB.
IV. P ERFORMANCE E VALUATION AND D ISCUSSION
We ran simulations of the discussed policies using MAT-
LAB 2015a 64 bit, following the parameters summarized in
Table 1 and observed the results shown in Fig.4. The location,
channel and traffic models are similar to [6], however the
allocation strategies operate per RB separately in the frequency
domain. User locations are generated following a Poisson point
process (PPP) with a density that is a multiple of the RRU
density. In other words, 10 users/cell means the user density
is 10 times larger than the RRU density. For evaluation, we
measure the average user packet level throughput (discounting
dropped packets due to timeouts). Particularly for the traffic
model, we used the NGMN model as in [6] but have set the
proportion of users with video traffic to 30% while decreasing
the number of users with file (FTP) traffic accordingly.
In OMA, standard OFDMA is used with the discussed
policy per RB. As for NOMA, we used the UPPA scheme
[10] for power allocation and user-pairing, as to the best of
our knowledge so far, it has the best performance. In CO-
OMA, the discussed policy is used with fixed clusters of 2
RRUs, based on coupling path-loss similar to the one used
, (10) in [6]. Finally, for CO-NOMA, we used 𝛼 = 1 for all our
simulations to reduce the computation time.
 TABLE I: Simulation Configuration
Parameter Simulation Model Parameters
Frequency/Bandwidth/Duplexing 2 GHz/10 MHz/FDD
Region 1500 m2
RRU Locations MHCPP-II 30.10−6 stations/m2
Inter-site Distance 500 m
Antenna Configuration 2D-Omni SISO
RRU Power 30 W
UE Locations PPP variable density
Hysteresis Threshold 3 dB
Access Scheme OMA/CO-OMA/NOMA/CO-NOMA
NOMA SIC Perfect cancellation, constraints [10]
Clustering Scheme Fixed
Maximum Cluster Size 2
Maximum NOMA Users 2
CO-NOMA Channel Exponent 1
FFT size 1024
Scheduling Interval 1 sub-frame
User motion random 0 to 6 kmph
Pathloss Model 3GPP Outdoor LOS-NLOS [14]
Fig. 4: Average user throughput per access scheme. Link Adaptation 10 % BLER target
Modulation Order QPSK, 16QAM, 64QAM
Channel Estimation Ideal
We can observe consistent improvements over different user Packet Drop Time 3GPP QoS table
densities, when using CO-NOMA. Naturally, when the number Traffic Model modified NGMN mix
of users increases, the performance drops for all strategies. HARQ retransmission Not modeled
However, the observed trend also shows that the performance
gap between strategies closes.
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