Human Cognition Aware QoE For NOMA Pricing: A Prospect-Theoretic Augmentation To Non-Orthogonal Wireless Multiple Access

Human cognition has become a fundamental metric to evaluate the Quality of Experience (QoE) and service provided in modern day communication systems. Expected Utility Theorem (EUT) is widely used to mathematically model human behavior and analyze decision-making process. However, studies carried out in literature reveal that the decision-making ability of users under certain circumstances, violate the precepts of EUT and proposed an alternative model called Prospect Theory (PT). On the other hand, Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) has been advocated as a new promising technique to improve network capacity performance. In NOMA research, issues such as congestion control and power allocation have been the primary focus and end-user QoE has largely been ignored. In the past, we have designed a NOMA pricing framework to simultaneously boost user QoE and base station profits while addressing the other issues of power selection and resource allocation. The primary focus of this paper is to introduce the new prospect-theoretic postulates to the NOMA pricing framework to further study the user QoE in wireless multimedia services. The prospect-theoretic QoE model for NOMA communication has been derived using the weighting function and value function. Further, we have simulated a NOMA network to evaluate the efficacy of the developed prospect-theoretic QoE model. Simulation results exemplify the potentials of prospect-theoretic QoE modeling of NOMA pricing framework in wireless multimedia communications.