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

While non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) improves spectral efficiency, it adds complexity to 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-κ that accounts for SIC-related power expenditure. Then, to investigate the energy efficiency of NOMA and joint transmission (JT)-coordinated multipoint (CoMP) NOMA, we formulate a power allocation problem for maximizing the energy efficiency and 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-κ 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 when users have identical rate requirements and more significant in more heterogeneous settings with users having different rate requirements. Moreover, when conventional NOMA is feasible, the optimal solution for JT-CoMP NOMA converges to conventional NOMA.