ACO-Based Power Allocation for Throughput Maximization in the Downlink 5G NOMA Systems

Abstract

Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) is a radio access technology that can increase the spectral efficiency of 5G networks. In a NOMA system, the power allocation is a combinatorial optimization problem since multiple users are multiplexed on the same radio resources. The power transmitted for each subchannel and the multiplexed users can be allocated by using metaheuristic methods to improve the system throughput. In this paper, ant colony optimization (ACO) is proposed to optimize the transmit power to maximize the overall throughput in the downlink of 5G NOMA systems. The ACO is one of the swarm intelligence algorithms that ensures that the optimal solution can be found via a number of iterations with specific values of parameters. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed power allocation scheme using ACO performs better in terms of the system throughput by up to 35%.