Fairness Comparison of Uplink NOMA and OMA

In this paper, we compare the resource allocation fairness of uplink communications between non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) schemes and orthogonal multiple access (OMA) schemes. Through characterizing the contribution of the individual user data rate to the system sum rate, we analyze the fundamental reasons that NOMA offers a more fair resource allocation than that of OMA in asymmetric channels. Furthermore, a fairness indicator metric based on Jain's index is proposed to measure the asymmetry of multiuser channels. More importantly, the proposed metric provides a selection criterion for choosing between NOMA and OMA for fair resource allocation. Based on this discussion, we propose a hybrid NOMA-OMA scheme to further enhance the users fairness. Simulation results confirm the accuracy of the proposed metric and demonstrate the fairness enhancement of the proposed hybrid NOMA-OMA scheme compared to the conventional OMA and NOMA schemes.Comment: 6 pages, accepted for publication, VTC 2017, Spring, Sydne

Turbo-like Iterative Multi-user Receiver Design for 5G Non-orthogonal Multiple Access

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NoMA) as an efficient way of radio resource sharing has been identified as a promising technology in 5G to help improving system capacity, user connectivity, and service latency in 5G communications. This paper provides a brief overview of the progress of NoMA transceiver study in 3GPP, with special focus on the design of turbo-like iterative multi-user (MU) receivers. There are various types of MU receivers depending on the combinations of MU detectors and interference cancellation (IC) schemes. Link-level simulations show that expectation propagation algorithm (EPA) with hybrid parallel interference cancellation (PIC) is a promising MU receiver, which can achieve fast convergence and similar performance as message passing algorithm (MPA) with much lower complexity.Comment: Accepted by IEEE 88th Vehicular Technology Conference (IEEE VTC-2018 Fall), 5 pages, 6 figure

Beamforming Techniques for Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access in 5G Cellular Networks

In this paper, we develop various beamforming techniques for downlink transmission for multiple-input single-output (MISO) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems. First, a beamforming approach with perfect channel state information (CSI) is investigated to provide the required quality of service (QoS) for all users. Taylor series approximation and semidefinite relaxation (SDR) techniques are employed to reformulate the original non-convex power minimization problem to a tractable one. Further, a fairness-based beamforming approach is proposed through a max-min formulation to maintain fairness between users. Next, we consider a robust scheme by incorporating channel uncertainties, where the transmit power is minimized while satisfying the outage probability requirement at each user. Through exploiting the SDR approach, the original non-convex problem is reformulated in a linear matrix inequality (LMI) form to obtain the optimal solution. Numerical results demonstrate that the robust scheme can achieve better performance compared to the non-robust scheme in terms of the rate satisfaction ratio. Further, simulation results confirm that NOMA consumes a little over half transmit power needed by OMA for the same data rate requirements. Hence, NOMA has the potential to significantly improve the system performance in terms of transmit power consumption in future 5G networks and beyond.Comment: accepted to publish in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technolog

A Universal Receiver for Uplink NOMA Systems

Given its capability in efficient radio resource sharing, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been identified as a promising technology in 5G to improve the system capacity, user connectivity, and scheduling latency. A dozen of uplink NOMA schemes have been proposed recently and this paper considers the design of a universal receiver suitable for all potential designs of NOMA schemes. Firstly, a general turbo-like iterative receiver structure is introduced, under which, a universal expectation propagation algorithm (EPA) detector with hybrid parallel interference cancellation (PIC) is proposed (EPA in short). Link-level simulations show that the proposed EPA receiver can achieve superior block error rate (BLER) performance with implementation friendly complexity and fast convergence, and is always better than the traditional codeword level MMSE-PIC receiver for various kinds of NOMA schemes.Comment: This paper has been accepted by IEEE/CIC International Conference on Communications in China (ICCC 2018). 5 pages, 4 figure