Superposition Coding Based User Combining Schemes for Non-Orthogonal Scheduling in a Wireless Relay System

We consider a wireless system where multiple users are served in Downlink (DL) by one Base Station (BS) and one Relay Station (RS). Previous research has shown that, combining two users´ messages via Superposition Coding (SC) could enhance their achievable rate and fairness, in both two-user and multi-user systems. In this work, we propose two novel SC schemes referred as Relayed/Direct (RD-SC) and Relayed/Relayed SC (RR-SC) schemes, that combine the messages to a pair of Relayed/Direct users or Relayed/Relayed users into three or four SC layers, where the number of SC layers is equal to the number of available links. For each scheme, power allocation under sum-rate maximization is analyzed, enabling to derive the optimal power ratios to each SC layer numerically. Then, we design the non-orthogonal Max Rate-Two User-SC (MR-TU-SC) Scheduler and Proportional Fair-Two User-SC (PF-TU-SC) Scheduler where a pair of selected users are allocated simultaneously based on RD-SC and RR-SC schemes. The simulation results show that the proposed schedulers significantly outperform the conventional orthogonal schedulers where a single user is allocated on a unit resource block, in terms of system throughput, fairness and outage, while approaching the upper bound performance.