Reliability and Fairness for UAV Communication Based on Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access

Recently, communication using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as relay nodes has been considered beneficial for a number of applications. Moreover, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) with users being assigned different signal power levels while sharing the same time-frequency domain has been found effective to enhance spectrum utilization and provide predictable access to the channel. Thus, in this paper we consider an UAV communication system with NOMA and propose a solution to find the optimal values for the user's power allocation coefficients (PACs) needed to achieve the required levels of communication reliability. We present a closed-form expression for the PAC of each user and also propose an algorithm for finding the optimal altitude of the UAV required to satisfy the fairness condition for all users. Finally, we provide numerical examples and compare the results for three types of communication environments.