Green Communication for NOMA-Based CRAN

Abstract

The number of wireless devices is growing rapidly on a daily basis echoing the increasing number of applications of the Internet of Thing. Facing massive connections and unavoidable interference, how to provide a green communication is a concerning matter. In this regard, nonorthogonal multiple-access (NOMA) is a natural communications technology that can scale with the massive number of simultaneous connections for a limited bandwidth. In this paper, we aim to maximize the energy efficiency (EE) for an NOMA-based cloud radio access network, where sub-6 GHz and millimeter wave bands are used in fronthaul and access links, respectively. In particular, we formulate the power optimization problem to maximize the EE of the system subject to the fronthaul capacity and transmit power constraints. To address this nonconvex problem, we first convert the fractional objective function into a subtractive form. A two-layer algorithm is then proposed. In the outer loop, the ${\\ell _{1}}$ -norm technique is adopted to transform the nonconvex fronthaul capacity constraint into a convex one, whereas in the inner loop, the weighted minimum mean square error approach is applied. Simulation results indicate that the proposed NOMA scheme can obtain higher EE as well as throughput when compared with orthogonal multiple-access methods.