Impact of Power Consumption Models on the Energy Efficiency of Downlink NOMA Systems

Abstract: While non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) improves spectral efficiency, it results in a complexity at the receivers due to successive interference cancellation (SIC). Prior studies on the energy efficiency of NOMA overlook the SIC overhead and rely on simplistic power consumption models (PCM). To fill this gap, we first introduce PCM-$\kappa$ that accounts for SIC-related power expenditure, where $\kappa$ represents the average power consumption per SIC layer. Then, to investigate the energy efficiency of NOMA and joint transmission (JT)-CoMP NOMA, we formulate a power allocation problem for maximizing the energy efficiency and consequently propose a global approach running at a centralized entity and a local algorithm running at a base station. We evaluate the energy efficiency using PCM-$\kappa$ and two PCMs commonly used in the literature. Numerical analysis suggests that using simplistic PCMs leads to a few orders of magnitude overestimation of energy efficiency, especially when the receivers have low rate requirements. Despite the superiority of JT-CoMP NOMA over conventional NOMA in finding a feasible power allocation, the difference in their energy efficiency is only marginal. Moreover, when conventional NOMA is feasible, the optimal solution for JT-CoMP NOMA converges to conventional NOMA and NOMA schemes favour the users with the best channel quality.