Full-Duplex Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access for Modern Wireless Networks

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is an interesting concept to provide higher capacity for future wireless communications. In this article, we consider the feasibility and benefits of combining full-duplex operation with NOMA for modern communication systems. Specifically, we provide a comprehensive overview on application of full-duplex NOMA in cellular networks, cooperative and cognitive radio networks, and characterize gains possible due to full-duplex operation. Accordingly, we discuss challenges, particularly the self-interference and inter-user interference and provide potential solutions to interference mitigation and quality-of-service provision based on beamforming, power control, and link scheduling. We further discuss future research challenges and interesting directions to pursue to bring full-duplex NOMA into maturity and use in practice.Comment: Revised, IEEE Wireless Communication Magazin

Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access: Common Myths and Critical Questions

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has received tremendous attention for the design of radio access techniques for fifth generation (5G) wireless networks and beyond. The basic concept behind NOMA is to serve more than one user in the same resource block, e.g., a time slot, subcarrier, spreading code, or space. With this, NOMA promotes massive connectivity, lowers latency, improves user fairness and spectral efficiency, and increases reliability compared to orthogonal multiple access (OMA) techniques. While NOMA has gained significant attention from the communications community, it has also been subject to several widespread misunderstandings, such as $``\textit{NOMA is based on allocating higher power to users with worse channel conditions. As such, cell-edge users receive more power in NOMA and due to this biased power allocation toward cell-edge users inter-cell interference is more severe in NOMA compared to OMA. NOMA also compromises security for spectral efficiency.}''$ The above statements are actually false, and this paper aims at identifying such common myths about NOMA and clarifying why they are not true. We also pose critical questions that are important for the effective adoption of NOMA in 5G and beyond and identify promising research directions for NOMA, which will require intense investigation in the future.Comment: To appear in the IEEE Wireless Communication

Multi-Beam NOMA for Hybrid mmWave Systems

In this paper, we propose a multi-beam non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme for hybrid millimeter wave (mmWave) systems and study its resource allocation. A beam splitting technique is designed to generate multiple analog beams to serve multiple users for NOMA transmission. Compared to conventional mmWave orthogonal multiple access (mmWave-OMA) schemes, the proposed scheme can serve more than one user on each radio frequency (RF) chain. Besides, in contrast to the recently proposed single-beam mmWave-NOMA scheme which can only serve multiple NOMA users within the same beam, the proposed scheme can perform NOMA transmission for the users with an arbitrary angle-of-departure (AOD) distribution. This provides a higher flexibility for applying NOMA in mmWave communications and thus can efficiently exploit the potential multi-user diversity. Then, we design a suboptimal two-stage resource allocation for maximizing the system sum-rate. In the first stage, assuming that only analog beamforming is available, a user grouping and antenna allocation algorithm is proposed to maximize the conditional system sum-rate based on the coalition formation game theory. In the second stage, with the zero-forcing (ZF) digital precoder, a suboptimal solution is devised to solve a non-convex power allocation optimization problem for the maximization of the system sum-rate which takes into account the quality of service (QoS) constraint. Simulation results show that our designed resource allocation can achieve a close-to-optimal performance in each stage. In addition, we demonstrate that the proposed multi-beam mmWave-NOMA scheme offers a higher spectral efficiency than that of the single-beam mmWave-NOMA and the mmWave-OMA schemes.Comment: Submitted for possible journal publicatio

Resource Allocation for Downlink NOMA Systems: Key Techniques and Open Issues

This article presents advances in resource allocation (RA) for downlink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems, focusing on user pairing (UP) and power allocation (PA) algorithms. The former pairs the users to obtain the high capacity gain by exploiting the channel gain difference between the users, while the later allocates power to users in each cluster to balance system throughput and user fairness. Additionally, the article introduces the concept of cluster fairness and proposes the divideand- next largest difference-based UP algorithm to distribute the capacity gain among the NOMA clusters in a controlled manner. Furthermore, performance comparison between multiple-input multiple-output NOMA (MIMO-NOMA) and MIMO-OMA is conducted when users have pre-defined quality of service. Simulation results are presented, which validate the advantages of NOMA over OMA. Finally, the article provides avenues for further research on RA for downlink NOMA.Comment: 5G, NOMA, Resource allocation, User pairing, Power allocatio

Resource Optimization with Load Coupling in Multi-cell NOMA

Optimizing non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in multi-cell scenarios is much more challenging than the single-cell case because inter-cell interference must be considered. Most papers addressing NOMA consider a single cell. We take a significant step of analyzing NOMA in multi-cell scenarios. We explore the potential of NOMA networks in achieving optimal resource utilization with arbitrary topologies. Towards this goal, we investigate a broad class of problems consisting in optimizing power allocation and user pairing for any cost function that is monotonically increasing in time-frequency resource consumption. We propose an algorithm that achieves global optimality for this problem class. The basic idea is to prove that solving the joint optimization problem of power allocation, user pair selection, and time-frequency resource allocation amounts to solving a so-called iterated function without a closed form. We prove that the algorithm approaches optimality with fast convergence. Numerically, we evaluate and demonstrate the performance of NOMA for multi-cell scenarios in terms of resource efficiency and load balancing

On User Pairing in NOMA Uplink

User pairing in Non-Orthogonal Multiple-Access (NOMA) uplink based on channel state information is investigated considering some predefined power allocation schemes. The base station divides the set of users into disjunct pairs and assigns the available resources to these pairs. The combinatorial problem of user pairing to achieve the maximum sum rate is analyzed in the large system limit for various scenarios, and some optimum and sub-optimum algorithms with a polynomial-time complexity are proposed. In the first scenario, $2M$ users and the base station have a single-antenna and communicate over $M$ subcarriers. The performance of optimum pairing is derived for $M\rightarrow \infty$ and shown to be superior to random pairing and orthogonal multiple access techniques. In the second setting, a novel NOMA scheme for a multi-antenna base station and single carrier communication is proposed. In this case, the users need not be aware of the pairing strategy. Furthermore, the proposed NOMA scheme is generalized to multi-antenna users. It is shown that random and optimum user pairing perform similarly in the large system limit, but optimum pairing is significantly better in finite dimensions. It is shown that the proposed NOMA scheme outperforms a previously proposed NOMA scheme with signal alignment.Comment: Submitted to Transaction on Wireless Communication

Enhanced Energy-Efficient Downlink Resource Allocation in Green Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access Systems

Despite numerous advantages, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique can bring additional interference for the neighboring ultra-dense networks if the power consumption of the system is not properly optimized. While targeting on the green communication concept, in this paper, we propose an energy-efficient downlink resource allocation scheme for a NOMA-equipped cellular network. The objective of this work is to allocate subchannels and power of the base station among the users so that the overall energy efficiency is maximized. Since this problem is NP-hard, we attempt to find an elegant solution with reasonable complexity that provides good performance for some realistic applications. To this end, we decompose the problem into a subchannel allocation subproblem followed by a power loading subproblem that allocates power to each user's data stream on each of its allocated subchannels. We first employ a many-to-many matching model under the assumption of uniform power loading in order to obtain the solution of the first subproblem with reasonable performance. Once the the subchannel-user mapping information is known from the first solution, we propose a geometric programming (GP)-based power loading scheme upon approximating the energy efficiency of the system by a ratio of two posynomials. The techniques adopted for these subproblems better exploit the available multi-user diversity compared to the techniques used in an earlier work. Having observed the computational overhead of the GP-based power loading scheme, we also propose a suboptimal computationally-efficient algorithm for the power loading subproblem with a polynomial time complexity that provides reasonably good performance. Extensive simulation has been conducted to verify that our proposed solution schemes always outperform the existing work while consuming much less power at the base station.Comment: 29 pages (Accepted

Robust Radio Resource Allocation in MISO-SCMA Assisted C-RAN in 5G Networks

In this paper, by considering multiple slices, a downlink transmission of a sparse code multiple access (SCMA) based cloud-radio access network (C-RAN) is investigated. In this regard, by supposing multiple input and single output (MISO) transmission technology, a novel robust radio resource allocation is proposed where considering uncertain channel state information (CSI), the worst case approach is applied. The main goal of the proposed radio resource allocation is to, maximize the system sum rate with maximum available power at radio remote head (RRH), minimum rate requirement of each slice, maximum frounthaul capacity of each RRH, user association, and SCMA constraints. To solve the proposed optimization problem in an efficient manner, an iterative method is deployed where in each iteration, beamforming and joint codebook allocation and user association subproblem are solved separately. By introducing some auxiliary variables, the joint codebook allocation and user association subproblem is transformed into an integer linear programming, and to solve the beamforming optimization problem, minorization-maximization algorithm (MMA) is applied. Via numerical results, the performance of the proposed system model versus different system parameters and for different channel models are investigated.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure

On the Performance Gain of NOMA over OMA in Uplink Communication Systems

In this paper, we investigate and reveal the ergodic sum-rate gain (ESG) of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) over orthogonal multiple access (OMA) in uplink cellular communication systems. A base station equipped with a single-antenna, with multiple antennas, and with massive antenna arrays is considered both in single-cell and multi-cell deployments. In particular, in single-antenna systems, we identify two types of gains brought about by NOMA: 1) a large-scale near-far gain arising from the distance discrepancy between the base station and users; 2) a small-scale fading gain originating from the multipath channel fading. Furthermore, we reveal that the large-scale near-far gain increases with the normalized cell size, while the small-scale fading gain is a constant, given by $\gamma$ = 0.57721 nat/s/Hz, in Rayleigh fading channels. When extending single-antenna NOMA to $M$-antenna NOMA, we prove that both the large-scale near-far gain and small-scale fading gain achieved by single-antenna NOMA can be increased by a factor of $M$ for a large number of users. Moreover, given a massive antenna array at the base station and considering a fixed ratio between the number of antennas, $M$, and the number of users, $K$, the ESG of NOMA over OMA increases linearly with both $M$ and $K$. We then further extend the analysis to a multi-cell scenario. Compared to the single-cell case, the ESG in multi-cell systems degrades as NOMA faces more severe inter-cell interference due to the non-orthogonal transmissions. Besides, we unveil that a large cell size is always beneficial to the ergodic sum-rate performance of NOMA in both single-cell and multi-cell systems. Numerical results verify the accuracy of the analytical results derived and confirm the insights revealed about the ESG of NOMA over OMA in different scenarios.Comment: 51 pages, 7 figures, invited paper, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Communication

Signal Processing for MIMO-NOMA: Present and Future Challenges

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), as the newest member of the multiple access family, is envisioned to be an essential component of 5G mobile networks. The combination of NOMA and multi-antenna multi-input multi-output (MIMO) technologies exhibits a significant potential in improving spectral efficiency and providing better wireless services to more users. In this article, we introduce the basic concepts of MIMO-NOMA and summarize the key technical problems in MIMO-NOMA systems. Then, we explore the problem formulation, beamforming, user clustering, and power allocation of single/multi-cluster MIMO-NOMA in the literature along with their limitations. Furthermore, we point out an important issue of the stability of successive interference cancellation (SIC) that arises using achievable rates as performance metrics in practical NOMA/MIMO-NOMA systems. Finally, we discuss incorporating NOMA with massive/millimeter wave MIMO, and identify the main challenges and possible future research directions in this area.Comment: 14 pages (single column), 4 figures. This work has been accepted by the IEEE Wireless Communications, the special issue of non-orthogonal multiple access for 5