Abstract

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and coordinated multi-point (CoMP) are two fundamental techniques considered for the fifth generation (5 G) of wireless communications. In this paper, a hybrid satellite-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) relay network (HSURN) is proposed where the UAV relays (URs) employ CoMP transmission to serve the terrestrial users (UEs). Furthermore, all UEs associated with the CoMP-URs form a single NOMA cluster. For this model, an optimization problem is formulated subject to the minimum quality of services (QoSs) requirements of the UEs, transmission power budgets and, successive interference cancellation (SIC), to select URs and allocate their transmission powers for the energy efficiency (EE) maximization. With this insight, first, a computationally efficient sub-optimal UR selection scheme is proposed. Then, the powers are allocated to the selected URs via the Lagrange multipliers optimization (LMO) method. Due to the non-convex nature of the considered problem, it is relatively difficult to be solved. Hence, a metaheuristic teaching-learning-based optimization (TLBO) algorithm is employed to achieve an efficient solution. Simulation results are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed sub-optimal relay selection scheme and the TLBO-based power allocation method compared to the LMO conventional method. Besides, the obtained results also reveal that the CoMP-NOMA transmission in the proposed scenario significantly improves the spectral efficiency (SE) and outage probability (OP) of the system compared to non-comp NOMA transmission case.