Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Assisted Communication

The future wireless networks promise to provide ubiquitous connectivity to a multitude of devices with diversified traffic patterns wherever and whenever needed. For the sake of boosting resilience against faults, natural disasters, and unexpected traffic, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted wireless communication systems can provide a unique opportunity to cater for such demands in a timely fashion without relying on the overly engineered cellular network. However, for UAV-assisted communication, issues of capacity, coverage, and energy efficiency are considered of paramount importance. The case of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is investigated for aerial base station (BS). NOMA's viability is established by formulating the sum-rate problem constituting a function of power allocation and UAV altitude. The optimization problem is constrained to meet individual user-rates arisen by orthogonal multiple access (OMA) bringing it at par with NOMA. The relationship between energy efficiency and altitude of a UAV inspires the solution to the aforementioned problem considering two cases, namely, altitude fixed NOMA and altitude optimized NOMA. The latter allows exploiting the extra degrees of freedom of UAV-BS mobility to enhance the spectral efficiency and the energy efficiency. Hence, it saves joules in the operational cost of the UAV. Finally, a constrained coverage expansion methodology, facilitated by NOMA user rate gain is also proposed. Results are presented for various environment settings to conclude NOMA manifesting better performance in terms of sum-rate, coverage, and energy efficiency.