  Network capacity calls for significant increase for 5G cellular systems. A
promising multi-user access scheme, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) with
successive interference cancellation (SIC), is currently under consideration.
In NOMA, spectrum efficiency is improved by allowing more than one user to
simultaneously access the same frequency-time resource and separating
multi-user signals by SIC at the receiver. These render resource allocation and
optimization in NOMA different from orthogonal multiple access in 4G. In this
paper, we provide theoretical insights and algorithmic solutions to jointly
optimize power and channel allocation in NOMA. For utility maximization, we
mathematically formulate NOMA resource allocation problems. We characterize and
analyze the problems' tractability under a range of constraints and utility
functions. For tractable cases, we provide polynomial-time solutions for global
optimality. For intractable cases, we prove the NP-hardness and propose an
algorithmic framework combining Lagrangian duality and dynamic programming
(LDDP) to deliver near-optimal solutions. To gauge the performance of the
obtained solutions, we also provide optimality bounds on the global optimum.
Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithmic solution can
significantly improve the system performance in both throughput and fairness
over orthogonal multiple access as well as over a previous NOMA resource
allocation scheme.
