Power Allocation Scheme for Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access in Underwater Acoustic Communications

In this paper, we propose a power allocation scheme for non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in underwater acoustic sensor networks (UWASNs). The existing terrestrial sum-rate maximization (SRM) power allocation scheme suffers from the degradation of the overall sum-rate in UWASNs due to wasteful resource created by unequal transmission times between each transmission path. To address this issue, we propose the equal transmission times (ETT) power allocation scheme, which can prevent wasteful resource generation by guaranteeing equal transmission times between each transmission path. ETT considers the number of packets waiting for transmission in the sender’s buffer for creating equal transmission times. Numerical results show that the proposed ETT outperforms SRM in terms of the overall sum-rate, while having nearly identical maximum sum-rate to the SRMs.