Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is one of the leading technologies for 5G communication. User pairing (UP) and power allocation (PA) are the key controlling mechanisms for the optimization of the performance of NOMA systems. This paper presents a novel UP and PA (UPPA) technique for capacity and fairness maximization in NOMA called (CFM-UPPA). The impact of the power allocation coefficient and the ratio between the channel gains of the paired users on the sum-rate capacity and the fairness in NOMA is firstly investigated. Then, based on this investigation, the PA and UP algorithms of the CFM-UPPA technique are proposed. The power allocation coefficient of the proposed PA is formulated as an exponentially decaying function of the ratio between the channel gains of the paired users to maximize the capacity and the fairness, and its maximum value is adjusted to guarantee the successive interference cancellation (SIC) constraints. The proposed UP is based on selecting the user that has the highest channel gain per subcarrier as the strong user to maximize the capacity and selecting the user that has the closest lower channel gain to the strong user’s channel gain as the weak user to improve the fairness and capacity. The performance evaluation of the proposed CFM-UPPA technique in terms of capacity, fairness, and outage probability demonstrates that its performance significantly outperforms that of the orthogonal multiple access (OMA) system and that of the NOMA system with random UP. Also, the simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed PA in improving the performance of other UP algorithms, such as the random UP algorithm.

5G; non-orthogonal multiple access; user pairing; power allocation; capacity; fairness