Joint Power Allocation and Channel Assignment for NOMA With Deep Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been considered as a significant candidate technique for the next generation wireless communication to support high throughput and massive connectivity. It allows different users to be multiplexed on one channel through applying superposition coding at the transmitter and successive interference cancellation (SIC) at the receiver. To fully utilize the benefit of the NOMA technique, the key problem is how to optimally allocate resources, such as power and channels, to users to maximize the system performance. There have been some existing works on the power allocation for the single-carrier NOMA system. However, how to optimally assign channels in the multi-carrier NOMA system is still unclear. In this paper, we propose a deep reinforcement learning framework to allocate resources to users in a near optimal way. Specifically, we exploit an attention-based neural network (ANN) to perform the channel assignment. Simulation results show that the proposed framework can achieve better system performance, compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.