An Analysis of Two-User Uplink Asynchronous Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access Systems

Recent studies have numerically demonstrated the possible advantages of the asynchronous non-orthogonal multiple access (ANOMA) over the conventional synchronous non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). The ANOMA makes use of the oversampling technique by intentionally introducing a timing mismatch between symbols of different users. Focusing on a two-user uplink system, for the first time, we analytically prove that the ANOMA with a sufficiently large frame length can always outperform the NOMA in terms of the sum throughput. To this end, we derive the expression for the sum throughput of the ANOMA as a function of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), frame length, and normalized timing mismatch. Based on the derived expression, we find that users should transmit at full powers to maximize the sum throughput. In addition, we obtain the optimal timing mismatch as the frame length goes to infinity. Moreover, we comprehensively study the impact of timing error on the ANOMA throughput performance. Two types of timing error, i.e., the synchronization timing error and the coordination timing error, are considered. We derive the throughput loss incurred by both types of timing error and find that the synchronization timing error has a greater impact on the throughput performance compared to the coordination timing error

Performance of Non-orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) with a Novel Asynchronous Interference Cancellation Technique

The non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) allows one subcarrier to be allocated to more than one user at the same time in an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system. NOMA is a promising technique to provide high throughput due to frequency reuse within a cell. In this paper, a novel interference cancellation (IC) technique is proposed for asynchronous NOMA systems. The proposed IC technique exploits a triangular pattern to perform the IC from all interfering users for the desired user. The bit error rate (BER) and capacity performance analysis of an uplink NOMA system with the proposed IC technique is presented, along with the comparison to orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems. The numerical and simulation results show that the NOMA with the proposed asynchronous IC technique outperforms the OFDMA. It is also shown that employing iterative IC provides significant performance gain for NOMA and the number of required iterations depends on the modulation level and the detection method.With hard-decision, two iterations are sufficient, however with soft-decision, two iterations are enough only for low modulation level, and more iterations are desirable for high modulation level

5GNOW: Challenging the LTE Design Paradigms of Orthogonality and Synchronicity

LTE and LTE-Advanced have been optimized to deliver high bandwidth pipes to wireless users. The transport mechanisms have been tailored to maximize single cell performance by enforcing strict synchronism and orthogonality within a single cell and within a single contiguous frequency band. Various emerging trends reveal major shortcomings of those design criteria: 1) The fraction of machine-type-communications (MTC) is growing fast. Transmissions of this kind are suffering from the bulky procedures necessary to ensure strict synchronism. 2) Collaborative schemes have been introduced to boost capacity and coverage (CoMP), and wireless networks are becoming more and more heterogeneous following the non-uniform distribution of users. Tremendous efforts must be spent to collect the gains and to manage such systems under the premise of strict synchronism and orthogonality. 3) The advent of the Digital Agenda and the introduction of carrier aggregation are forcing the transmission systems to deal with fragmented spectrum. 5GNOW is an European research project supported by the European Commission within FP7 ICT Call 8. It will question the design targets of LTE and LTE-Advanced having these shortcomings in mind and the obedience to strict synchronism and orthogonality will be challenged. It will develop new PHY and MAC layer concepts being better suited to meet the upcoming needs with respect to service variety and heterogeneous transmission setups. Wireless transmission networks following the outcomes of 5GNOW will be better suited to meet the manifoldness of services, device classes and transmission setups present in envisioned future scenarios like smart cities. The integration of systems relying heavily on MTC into the communication network will be eased. The per-user experience will be more uniform and satisfying. To ensure this 5GNOW will contribute to upcoming 5G standardization.Comment: Submitted to Workshop on Mobile and Wireless Communication Systems for 2020 and beyond (at IEEE VTC 2013, Spring

Asynchronous Channel Training in Multi-Cell Massive MIMO

Pilot contamination has been regarded as the main bottleneck in time division duplexing (TDD) multi-cell massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The pilot contamination problem cannot be addressed with large-scale antenna arrays. We provide a novel asynchronous channel training scheme to obtain precise channel matrices without the cooperation of base stations. The scheme takes advantage of sampling diversity by inducing intentional timing mismatch. Then, the linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) estimator and the zero-forcing (ZF) estimator are designed. Moreover, we derive the minimum square error (MSE) upper bound of the ZF estimator. In addition, we propose the equally-divided delay scheme which under certain conditions is the optimal solution to minimize the MSE of the ZF estimator employing the identity matrix as pilot matrix. We calculate the uplink achievable rate using maximum ratio combining (MRC) to compare asynchronous and synchronous channel training schemes. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the asynchronous channel estimation scheme can greatly reduce the harmful effect of pilot contamination

On the Uplink Performance of Asynchronous LAS-CDMA

In this paper closed-form formulae are derived for characterizing the BER performance of Large Area Synchronous CDMA (LAS-CDMA) as a function of both the number of resolvable paths Lp and the maximum delay difference τmax, as well as the number of users K, when communicating over a Nakagami-m fading channel. Moreover, we comparatively studies the performance of LAS-CDMA and the traditional random code based DS-CDMA