In order to improve the reliability and resource utilization efficiency of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication system, in this paper, the fairness optimization and power allocation for the cognitive V2V network that takes into account the realistic three-dimensional (3D) channel are investigated. Large-scale and small-scale fading are considered in the proposed channel model. An adaptive non-orthogonal multiple access ( NOMA) / orthogonal multiple access (OMA) scheme is proposed to reduce the complexity of successive-interference-cancellation (SIC) in decoding and improve spectrum utilization. Also, a fairness index that takes into account each user’s requirements is proposed to indicate the optimal point clearly. In the imperfect SIC, the optimization problem of maximizing user fairness is formulated. Then, a subgradient descent method is proposed to solve the optimization problem with customizable precision. And the computational complexity of the proposed method is analyzed. The achievable rate, outage probability and user fairness are analyzed. The results show that the proposed adaptive NOMA / OMA (A-NOMA / OMA) outperforms both NOMA and OMA. The simulation results are compared with validated analysis to confirm the theoretical analysis.