Abstract
In this paper, we consider a non-ideal successive interference cancellation receiver-based imperfect non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) schemes whose performance is limited by three factors: 1) power disparity & sensitivity constraints; 2) intra-cluster interference (ICRI); and 3) intercell-interference (ICI). By quantifying the residual interference with a fractional error factor (FEF), we show that NOMA cannot always perform better than orthogonal multiple access (OMA) especially under certain receiver sensitivity and FEF levels. Assuming the existence of an offline/online ICI management scheme, the proposed solution accounts for the ICI which is shown to deteriorate the NOMA performance particularly when it becomes significant compared to the ICRI. Then, a distributed cluster formation (CF) and power-bandwidth allocation (PBA) approach are proposed for downlink heterogeneous networks (HetNets) operating on the imperfect NOMA. We develop a hierarchically distributed solution methodology, where BSs independently form clusters and distributively determine the power-bandwidth allowance of each cluster. A generic CF scheme is obtained by creating a multi-partite graph via partitioning user equipment with respect to their channel gains since NOMA performance is primarily determined by the channel gain disparity of cluster members. A sequential weighted bi-partite matching method is proposed for solving the resulted weighted multi-partite matching problem. Thereafter, we present a hierarchically distributed PBA approach which consists of the primary master, secondary masters, and slave problems. For a given cluster power and bandwidth pair, optimal power allocations and Lagrange multipliers of slave problems are derived in closed-form. While power allowance of clusters is updated by the secondary masters based on dual variables of slave problems, bandwidth proportions of clusters are iteratively allocated by the primary master as per the utility achieved by the secondary masters at the previous iteration. Finally, the proposed CF and PBA approaches under the operation of imperfect NOMA are investigated and compared to the OMA scheme by extensive simulations results in DL-HetNets.