Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been used as flying base stations (BSs) to take advantage of line-of-sight (LOS) connectivity and efficiently enable fifth-generation (5G) and cellular network coverage and data rates. On the other hand, nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a promising technique to help achieve unprecedented requirements by simultaneously allowing multiple users to send data over the same resource block. In this paper, we study a UAV-enabled uplink NOMA network, where the UAV collects data from ground users while flying at a certain altitude. Unlike all existing work on this topic, this study consists of two stages. In the first stage, we use the well-known Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm, which is a metaheuristic algorithm, to deploy the UAV in 3D space, so that the users’ sum pathlosses are minimized. In the second stage, we investigate the user pairing problem and propose a dynamic power allocation technique for determining the user’s power allocation coefficients, as well as a closed-form equation for the ergodic sum-rate. Results show our PSO-based algorithm prevailing over the Genetic Algorithm (GA) and random deployment methods. The proposed dynamic power allocation strategy maximizes the network’s ergodic sum-rate and outperforms the fixed power allocation strategy. Additionally, the results reveal that the best pairing scheme is the one that keeps uniform channel gain difference in the same pair.
PSO-Based UAV Deployment and Dynamic Power Allocation for UAV-Enabled Uplink NOMA Network