Assessing the Performance of NOMA in a Multi-Cell Context: A General Evaluation Framework

Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) is a Resource Sharing Mechanism (RSM) initially studied for 5G cellular networks and brought back to the agenda for 6G networks. While NOMA’s benefit at the level of a single cell has been properly established, assessing its performance at the scale of a cellular network remains an open research problem. This is mainly due to the inter-dependencies between scheduling, power control and inter-cell interference. Some algorithms have been proposed to optimize resource allocation in a multi-cell network, but they require a perfect and unrealistic knowledge of the whole channel states. In this paper, we leverage Bayesian Optimization techniques to build a versatile evaluation framework, able to assess the performance of multi-cell networks implementing a large variety of RSMs under a minimal set of assumptions. Subsequently, we illustrate how this evaluation framework can be used to compare the performance of several well-known RSMs under various fairness requirements and beamforming efficiencies. Our results show that, among the RSMs studied on a simple multi-cell network simulation, NOMA combined with a full reuse policy consistently emerges as the one able to achieve the highest end-users achievable rates under fairness constraints.