Radio Resource Allocation with The Fairness Metric for Low Density Signature OFDM in Underlay Cognitive Radio Networks †

Low density signature orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (LDS-OFDM), one type of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), is a special case of multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA). In LDS-OFDM, each user is allowed to spread its symbols in a small set of subcarriers, and there is only a small group of users that are permitted to share the same subcarrier. In this paper, we study the resource allocation for LDS-OFDM as the multiple access model in cognitive radio networks. In our scheme, SUs are allocated to certain [Formula: see text] subcarriers based on minimum interference or higher SINR in each subcarrier. To overcome the problem where SUs were allocated less than the [Formula: see text] subcarriers, we propose interference limit-based resource allocation with the fairness metric (ILRA-FM). Simulation results show that, compared to the ILRA algorithm, the ILRA-FM algorithm has a lower outage probability and higher fairness metric value and also a higher throughput fairness index.