icbnet

The goal of this paper is to evaluate the performance of a proposed resource management approach that mitigates the co-channel interference (CCI) in non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scenarios and maintains their enhanced spectral efficiency in distributed massive multiple input multiple output (d-massive MIMO) configurations as well. In this context, dedicated resource scheduling algorithms (RSAs) in power domain (PD) and frequency domain (FD) are studied in terms of resources’ orthogonality. Specifically, in PD case, adjusted power levels (denoted as PD-NOMA) per subcarrier and mobile terminal (MT) are assigned, while in FD case, the subcarriers are either orthogonal (FD orthogonal multiple access, FD-OMA) or non-orthogonal (FD-NOMA) to each other. The response of the d-massive MIMO system is evaluated statistically via independent Monte Carlo (MC) simulations considering a multicellular multi-user network topology and compared to typical multicellular MIMO configurations. In this framework, a simulation platform is implemented that integrates both the PD and FD RSAs. In PD, both intercell co-channel interference (Inter-CCI) and intracell co-Channel interference (Intra-CCI) are modelled analytically in order to estimate the assigned power per subcarrier and MT. In the latter case (Intra-CCI), the worst-case scenario is assumed: a subcarrier can be assigned to multiple MTs (full spectral overlapping) leading to intense Intra-CCI. In FD, two subcarrier allocation approaches are considered: Pseudo-Random or maximum signal-to-noise ratio (MSNR). The simulations in both FD implementations (FD-NOMA, FD-OMA) show that, thanks to the proposed PD-NOMA scheme, each MT requires 1/4 of the maximum available power for downlink transmission. Moreover, in any of the investigated NOMA schemes, despite the intense Intra-CCI, roughly the same number of MTs as in the OMA case can access the network. Therefore, it is straightforward that, even in worst-case scenarios, the NOMA RSAs (i) are wisely exploiting the available resources; (ii) can inherently combat intense Intra-CCI and, in this way, maintain the system’s performance (number of MTs, power savings, resilience against CCI, computation complexity). Finally, it is worth noting that in contrary to typical MIMO configurations, the d-massive MIMO architecture alone can lead up to a 13.63% increase in the system’s capacity (10% maximum allowed blocking probability, 1 tier, 1 subcarrier per MT). In this case, the increased spatial separation that is achieved, along with the exploitation of NOMA RSAs, lead to a decreased CCI (both Intra- and Inter-); hence, SNR is improved and consequently the number of accepted MTs as well.