Downlink Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) Combined with Single User MIMO (SU-MIMO)

Anass BENJEBBOUR
Anxin LI
Keisuke SAITO
Yoshihisa KISHIYAMA
Takehiro NAKAMURA

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E98-B    No.8    pp.1415-1425
Publication Date: 2015/08/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1345
DOI: 10.1587/transcom.E98.B.1415
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on 5G Radio Access Networks―Part I: Radio Access Technologies and System Design)
Category: 
Keyword: 
cellular system,  non-orthogonal multiple access,  superposition coding,  MIMO,  successive interference cancellation,  

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Summary: 
This paper investigates a downlink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) combined with single user MIMO (SU-MIMO) for future LTE (Long-Term Evolution) enhancements. In particular, we propose practical schemes to efficiently combine NOMA with open-loop SU-MIMO (Transmission Mode 3: TM3) and closed-loop SU-MIMO (Transmission Mode 4: TM4) specified in LTE. The goal is also to clarify the performance gains of NOMA combined with SU-MIMO transmission, taking into account the LTE radio interface such as frequency-domain scheduling, adaptive modulation and coding (AMC), and NOMA specific functionalities such as, multi-user pairing/ordering, transmit power allocation and successive interference cancellation (SIC) at the receiver side. Based on computer simulations, we evaluate NOMA link-level performance and show that the impact of error propagation associated with SIC is marginal when the power ratio of cell-edge and cell-center users is sufficiently large. In addition, we evaluate NOMA system-level performance gains for different granularities of scheduling and MCS (modulation and coding scheme) selection, for both genie-aided channel quality information (CQI) estimation and approximated CQI estimation, and using different number of power sets. Evaluation results show that NOMA combined with SU-MIMO can still provide a hefty portion of its expected gains even with approximated CQI estimation and limited number of power sets, and also when LTE compliant subband scheduling and wideband MCS is applied.