Abstract

Nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is seen as an important technology for tomorrow’s Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems. In uplink power-domain NOMA (PD-NOMA), allocating the uplink transmit power of the IoT devices is important to maximize both the sum rate and the reliability of devices. However, it is challenging to optimize the uplink transmit power when the received signal power is affected by a random fading channel. Hence, in this article, the problem of uplink transmit power assignment is studied for a wireless network with PD-NOMA that serves uplink IoT services. This is posed as a problem of determining the target received signal power at the base station (BS) so that the reliability and upper bound of sum rate of the users are jointly maximized, where the received signal power at the BS is unknown to the devices due to Nakagami- $m$ fading channel. To find an optimal allocation of the lower and higher target received power values for the devices using PD-NOMA, the reliability and upper bound of sum rate are derived in terms of target received power values and power difference threshold. For a special case of Nakagami- $m$ fading channel, the theoretical analysis shows that the highest reliability and the highest upper bound of sum rate are achieved, when the target received power values are highest. For a general Nakagami- $m$ fading channel, simulation results show that there is a tradeoff between reliability and sum-rate upper bound and, thus, allocation of lower and higher target received power values is necessary to satisfy the communication requirements of IoT devices. Moreover, for a special case of Nakagami- $m$ fading channel, simulation results show that the derived optimal transmit power achieves the optimal sum-rate upper bound and reliability, and the target received power values of two devices must be highest for the maximum upper bound of sum rate and reliability. Furthermore, in simulation results, increasing the lower and higher target received power values increases both the upper bound of sum rate and reliability.