Double iterative waterfilling for sum rate maximization in multicarrier NOMA systems

This paper investigates the subcarrier and power allocation for the downlink of a multicarrier non-orthogonal multiple access (MC-NOMA) system. A three-step algorithm is proposed to deal with the sum rate maximization problem. In Step 1, we assume that each user can use all the subcarriers simultaneously and apply the synchronous iterative waterfilling algorithm (SIWA) to obtain a power vector for each user. In Step 2, subcarriers are assigned to users by a heuristic greedy method based on the achieved power allocation result of Step 1. In Step 3, SIWA is used once again to further improve the system performance with the obtained subcarrier assignment result of Step 2. The convergence of SIWA in Step 3 is proved when the number of multiplexed users is no more than two. Since SIWA is applied twice, we call our three-step method Double Iterative Waterfilling Algorithm (DIWA). Numerical results show that the proposed DIWA achieves comparable performance to an existing near-optimal solution but with much lower time complexity.