When the codeword level interference cancellation (CW-IC) is used at the receiver in conjunction with the superposition coding scheme at the transmitter, in order to guarantee the success of signal reception, restrictions of scheduling decisions in resource allocation of superposed transport blocks may occur. A method to mitigate the scheduling restrictions is proposed. For a low-geometry UE in NOMA operation, one sub-band is used as the basic scheduling unit. As a result, data in resource blocks scheduled for NOMA operation and data in resource blocks scheduled for other non-NOMA operation correspond to different transport blocks. Therefore, a high-geometric UE only needs to decode the data scheduled for NOMA. The base station does not need to impose additional scheduling restrictions and signaling overhead.