Abstract
Since the intra-group co-channel interference is introduced intentionally by the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique, the reliability of NOMA based networks is limited by far users, while the sum-rate is mainly contributed by near users. In this paper, a NOMA based multiband scheduling policy is proposed to overcome this problem. Unlike conventional NOMA where all users are served in a single frequency band, the proposed scheme divides the entire band into multiple sub-bands, and accommodates the near and far users in different manners by exploring the sub-bands. Particularly, the far users employ repetition-based transmission in all sub-bands, and the maximum ratio combination (MRC) is integrated with successive interference cancellation (SIC) to jointly decode their intended symbols. Closed-form expression of the achievable sum-rate of the proposed scheme is derived, and the outage performance is characterized by the derived upper-bounded outage probability. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme enables NOMA systems to achieve both high reliability and high sum-rate.