Energy-efficient resource allocation in a multi-UAV-aided NOMA network

This paper is concerned with the resource allocation in a multi-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-aided network for providing enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) services for user equipments. Different from most of the existing network resource allocation approaches, we investigate a joint non-orthogonal user association, subchannel allocation and power control problem. The objective of the problem is to maximize the network energy efficiency under the constraints on user equipments’ quality of service, UAVs’ network capacity and power consumption. We formulate the energy efficiency maximization problem as a challenging mixed-integer non-convex programming problem. To alleviate this problem, we first decompose the original problem into two subproblems, namely, an integer non-linear user association and subchannel allocation subproblem and a non-convex power control subproblem. We then design a two-stage approximation strategy to handle the non-linearity of the user association and subchannel allocation subproblem and exploit a successive convex approximation approach to tackle the non-convexity of the power control subproblem. Based on the derived results, we develop an iterative algorithm with provable convergence to mitigate the original problem. Simulation results show that our proposed framework can improve energy efficiency compared with several benchmark algorithms.