Uplink Precoding Optimization for NOMA Cellular-Connected UAV Networks

Xiaowei Pang, Guan Gui, Nan Zhao, Weile Zhang, Yunfei Chen, Zhiguo Ding, Fumiyuki Adachi

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

59 Scopus citations

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are playing an important role in wireless networks, due to their cost effectiveness and flexible deployment. Particularly, integrating UAVs into existing cellular networks has great potential to provide high-rate and ultra-reliable communications. In this paper, we investigate the uplink transmission in a cellular network from a UAV using non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and from ground users to base stations (BSs). Specifically, we aim to maximize the sum rate of uplink from UAV to BSs in a specific band as well as from the UAV's co-channel users to their associated BSs via optimizing the precoding vectors at the multi-antenna UAV. To mitigate the interference, we apply successive interference cancellation (SIC) not only to the UAV-connected BSs, but also to the BSs associated with ground users in the same band. The precoding optimization problem with constraints on the SIC decoding and the transmission rate requirements is formulated, which is non-convex. Thus, we introduce auxiliary variables and apply approximations based on the first-order Taylor expansion to convert it into a second-order cone programming. Accordingly, an iterative algorithm is designed to obtain the solution to the problem with low complexity. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.

Original languageBritish English
Article number8906143
Pages (from-to)1271-1283
Number of pages13
JournalIEEE Transactions on Communications
Volume68
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 2020

Keywords

  • Non-orthogonal multiple access
  • precoding optimization
  • successive interference cancellation
  • unmanned aerial vehicle

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