A D2D-Based Solution for MTC Connectivity Problem in NOMA-Based Cellular IoT Networks: Dynamic User Grouping and Resource Allocation

In a cellular network (CN), cellular users (CUs) located nearby machine type communications (MTC) devices (MTC-Ds) may act as uplink gateways to relay data to the base station (BS). We consider non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and successive interference cancellation (SIC) at the receiver to increase the number of connected devices and the spectrum efficiency. Both underlay and overlay spectrum access modes (SAMs) are considered. We introduce a dynamic user grouping (UG) concept as a practical constraint for SIC, in order to decrease the receiver complexity. Moreover, SIC constraints are introduced based on a minimum signal-to-noise-plus-interference ratio (SINR) at the receiver. We formulate a joint dynamic UG, power allocation, and resource block (RB) assignment problem, aiming at maximizing the total sum-rate of both CUs and MTC-Ds. We transform the obtained non-convex mixed-integer programming problem into a convex problem by using a quadratic fractional programming (FP). A heuristic method is also proposed to reduce complexity. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed solution outperforms the conventional CN (C-CN) method and the results of the proposed optimization methods are close to optimal solution obtained by the exhaustive search (ES) algorithm in terms of total average sum-rate and network connectivity, while requiring less transmit power. The heuristic method decrease the computational complexity of the FP method at the expense of a small reduction in spectrum efficiency.