In this paper, we consider a downlink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system over Nakagami-m channels. The single-antenna base station serves two single-antenna NOMA users based on statistical channel state information (CSI). We derive the closed-form expression of the exact outage probability under a given decoding order, and we also deduce the asymptotic outage probability and diversity order in a high-SNR regime. Then, we analyze all the possible power allocation ranges and theoretically prove the optimal power allocation range under the corresponding decoding order. The demarcation points of the optimal power allocation ranges are affected by target data rates and total power, without an effect from the CSI. In particular, the values of the demarcation points are proportional to the total power. Furthermore, we formulate a joint decoding order and power allocation optimization problem to maximize the sum throughput, which is solved by efficiently searching in our obtained optimal power allocation ranges. Finally, Monte Carlo simulations are conducted to confirm the accuracy of our derived exact outage probability. Numerical results show the accuracy of our deduced demarcation points of the optimal power allocation ranges. And the optimal decoding order is not constant at different total transmit power levels.

This paper considers a downlink multiple input single output (MISO) non‐orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system over Nakagami‐m fading channels, where a multi‐antenna base station (BS) serves several single‐antenna users with the statistical channel state information (CSI) of each user. We propose a novel low‐complexity transmit antenna selection by head user (TAS‐head) strategy for the first time to exploit the spatial diversity of multiple antennas. Based on our proposed TAS‐head strategy, we derive a closed‐form expression of the exact outage probability (OP). We further analyse the asymptotic OP and diversity order in high signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR) regime. Finally, we formulate a power allocation optimization problem to maximize sum throughput under outage constraints. We also design an Adam algorithm in combination with numerical differentiation method to obtain a suboptimal solution. Monte Carlo (MC) simulations verify the accuracy of our derived exact OP. Results show that our proposed TAS‐head strategy is more effective than its benchmarks (TAS‐near/far and TAS‐maj). Furthermore, we prove that PA‐TDR criterion achieves better performance than PA‐ACG in scenarios where the descending order of target data rate is the same with that of channel condition. Our designed Adam algorithm turns out to be more effective in comparison with genetic algorithm (GA) in multi‐user case. Results indicate that our proposed TAS‐head strategy is an efficient method to meet users' QoS requirements, especially in low SNR (or transmit power) regime.