This paper considers a wireless network with a base station (BS) conducting timely status updates to multiple clients via adaptive non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)/orthogonal multiple access (OMA). Specifically, the BS is able to adaptively switch between NOMA and OMA for the downlink transmission to optimize the information freshness of the network, characterized by the Age of Information (AoI) metric. If the BS chooses OMA, it can only serve one client within each time slot and should decide which client to serve; if the BS chooses NOMA, it can serve more than one client at the same time and needs to decide the power allocated to the served clients. For the simple two-client case, we formulate a Markov Decision Process (MDP) problem and develop the optimal policy for the BS to decide whether to use NOMA or OMA for each downlink transmission based on the instantaneous AoI of both clients. The optimal policy is shown to have a switching-type property with obvious decision switching boundaries. A near-optimal policy with lower computation complexity is also devised. For the more general multi-client scenario, inspired by the proposed near-optimal policy, we formulate a nonlinear optimization problem to determine the optimal power allocated to each client by maximizing the expected AoI drop of the network in each time slot. We resolve the formulated problem by approximating it as a convex optimization problem. We also derive the upper bound of the gap between the approximate convex problem and the original nonlinear, nonconvex problem. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the adopted approximation. The performance of the adaptive NOMA/OMA scheme by solving the convex optimization is shown to be close to that of max-weight policy solved by exhaustive search...
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