A NOMA-enhanced reconfigurable access scheme with device pairing for M2M networks

This paper aims to address the distinct requirements of machine-to-machine networks, particularly heterogeneity and massive transmissions. To this end, a reconfigurable medium access control (MAC) with the ability to choose a proper access scheme with the optimal configuration for devices based on the network status is proposed. In this scheme, in each frame, a separate time duration is allocated for each of the nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based, orthogonal multiple access (OMA)-based, and random access-based segments, where the length of each segment can be optimized. To solve this optimization problem, an iterative algorithm consisting of two sub-problems is proposed. The first sub-problem deals with selecting devices for the NOMA/OMA-based transmissions, while the second one optimizes the parameter of the random access scheme. To show the efficacy of the proposed scheme, the results are compared with the reconfigurable scheme which does not support NOMA. The results demonstrate that by using a proper device pairing scheme for the NOMA-based transmissions, the proposed reconfigurable scheme achieves better performance when NOMA is adopted.