Abstract
By blending the concepts of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, in this paper, a novel hybrid scheme is conceived for supporting diverse services in future wireless systems. Motivating to maximize energy efficiency (EE), the joint resource management of user clustering (UC) and power allocation is investigated for the downlink hybrid NOMA systems. Under two different power consumption cases, the optimal resource allocation (Opt-RA) algorithm is developed with the help of converting the original mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP) problem to the tractable decoupled problems. For practical implementation, the heuristic resource allocation (Heur-RA) algorithm is also proposed, and it includes a low-complexity UC algorithm based on the candidate search-and-allocation approach. Our simulation results show that, both the Opt-RA and Heur-RA algorithms achieve significantly higher EE performance than other existing algorithms. Further, the results also prove that, the hybrid NOMA conceived is able to exploit the advantages of NOMA scheme, and is superior to conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA) in terms of EE, as well as achieving higher flexibility for system configuration than NOMA.