Non-orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) with Successive Interference Cancellation for Future Radio Access

TLDR

NOMA with successive interference cancellation is expected to provide a better tradeoff between system efficiency and user fairness than orthogonal multiple access, especially when users experience significantly different channel conditions and can exploit the near‑far effect. This paper investigates NOMA as a promising power‑domain user multiplexing scheme for future radio access. The authors describe the basic principle of NOMA in both downlink and uplink and propose a multi‑antenna base‑station scheme. Simulations demonstrate that NOMA can achieve higher system‑level throughput than OMA.

Abstract

This paper presents our investigation of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) as a novel and promising power-domain user multiplexing scheme for future radio access. Based on information theory, we can expect that NOMA with a successive interference canceller (SIC) applied to the receiver side will offer a better tradeoff between system efficiency and user fairness than orthogonal multiple access (OMA), which is widely used in 3.9 and 4G mobile communication systems. This improvement becomes especially significant when the channel conditions among the non-orthogonally multiplexed users are significantly different. Thus, NOMA can be expected to efficiently exploit the near-far effect experienced in cellular environments. In this paper, we describe the basic principle of NOMA in both the downlink and uplink and then present our proposed NOMA scheme for the scenario where the base station is equipped with multiple antennas. Simulation results show the potential system-level throughput gains of NOMA relative to OMA.