This paper investigates a new strategy for radio resource allocation applying a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme. It calls for the cohabitation of users in the power domain at the transmitter side and for successive interference canceller (SIC) at the receiver side. Taking into account multi-user scheduling, subband assignment and transmit power allocation, a hybrid NOMA scheme is introduced. Adaptive switching to orthogonal signaling (OS) is performed whenever the non-orthogonal cohabitation in the power domain does not improve the achieved data rate per subband. In addition, a new power allocation technique based on waterfilling is introduced to improve the total achieved system throughput. We show that the proposed strategy for resource allocation improves both the spectral efficiency and the cell-edge user throughput. It also proves to be robust in the case of communications in crowded areas.Index terms -non-orthogonal multiple access, power domain multiplexing, waterfilling, resource allocation.

In this letter, a low-complexity waterfilling-based Power Allocation (PA) technique, incorporated within the Proportional Fairness (PF) scheduler, is proposed and applied to a Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) scheme in a cellular downlink system. The aim of the proposed joint PA and scheduling scheme is to maximize the achieved average throughput through a quasi-optimal repartition of the transmit power among subbands, while guaranteeing a high level of fairness in resource allocation. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed technique enhances both system capacity and user fairness, when compared to either orthogonal signaling (OS) or NOMA with static PA.