Energy-Efficiency Power Allocation Design for UAV-Assisted Spatial NOMA

For the future sixth-generation (6G) wireless communication networks, improved metrics are expected to provide connectivity of massive devices, which brings new challenges for 6G networks extending to modern radio access for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. We consider a 6G enabled nonterrestrial network working in remote areas in this article, where an on-demand unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) provides the connectivity services. To improve the energy efficiency (EE), a method combining nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and spatial modulation (SM) techniques is proposed and termed spatial NOMA (S-NOMA). Particularly, by employing multiple input multiple output (MIMO), SM only activates partial transmit antennas in per symbol interval, which can provide large data rate with less interantenna interference (IAI). Moreover, a power allocation optimization method subject to EE for S-NOMA scheme is proposed. Specifically, the antenna selection bits are determined by all users, which improves EE for all users instead of the selected one. Besides, the capacity expressions of S-NOMA are derived, then the EE performance of S-NOMA is analyzed. In addition, simulation results show that the proposed S-NOMA with energy-efficient power allocation performs better EE performance compared with the conventional NOMA.