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

Kenichi HIGUCHI  Anass BENJEBBOUR  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E98-B   No.3   pp.403-414
Publication Date: 2015/03/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1345
DOI: 10.1587/transcom.E98.B.403
Type of Manuscript: Invited Survey Paper
Category: Wireless Communication Technologies
Keyword: 
cellular system,  non-orthogonal multiple access,  superposition coding,  successive interference cancellation,  

Full Text: FreePDF(2.2MB)

Summary: 
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.