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

General Framework and Novel Transceiver Architecture based on Hybrid Beamforming for NOMA in Massive MIMO Channels

Massive MIMO and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) are crucial methods for future wireless systems as they provide many advantages over conventional systems. Power domain NOMA methods are investigated in massive MIMO systems, whereas there is little work on integration of code domain NOMA and massive MIMO which is the subject of this study. We propose a general framework employing user-grouping based hybrid beamforming architecture for mm-wave massive MIMO systems where NOMA is considered as an intra-group process. It is shown that classical receivers of sparse code multiple access (SCMA) and multi-user shared access (MUSA) can be directly adapted. Additionally, a novel receiver architecture which is an improvement over classical one is proposed for uplink MUSA. This receiver makes MUSA preferable over SCMA for uplink transmission with lower complexity. We provide a lower bound on achievable information rate (AIR) as a performance measure. We show that code domain NOMA schemes outperform conventional methods with very limited number of radio frequency (RF) chains where users are spatially close to each other. Furthermore, we provide an analysis in terms of bit-error rate and AIR under different code length and overloading scenarios for uplink transmission where flexible structure of MUSA is exploited.Comment: Partially presented at IEEE ICC 2020 Workshop on NOMA for 5G and Beyond and to be submitted to IEEE Transactions on Communication

Resource Allocation-Based PAPR Analysis in Uplink SCMA-OFDM Systems

Sparse code multiple access (SCMA) is a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) uplink solution that overloads resource elements (RE's) with more than one user. Given the success of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, SCMA will likely be deployed as a multiple access scheme over OFDM, called an SCMA-OFDM system. One of the major challenges with OFDM systems is the high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) problem, which is typically studied through the PAPR statistics for a system with a large number of independently modulated sub-carriers (SCs). In the context of SCMA systems, the PAPR problem has been studied before through the SCMA codebook design for certain narrowband scenarios, applicable more for low-rate users. However, we show that for high-rate users in wideband systems, it is more meaningful to study the PAPR statistics. In this paper, we highlight some novel aspects to the PAPR statistics for SCMA-OFDM systems that is different from the vast body of existing PAPR literature in the context of traditional OFDM systems. The main difference lies in the fact that the SCs are not independently modulated in SCMA-OFDM systems. Instead, the SCMA codebook uses multi-dimensional constellations, leading to a statistical dependency between the data carrying SCs. Further, the SCMA codebook dictates that an UL user can only transmit on a subset of the available SCs. We highlight the joint effect of the two major factors that influence the PAPR statistics-the phase bias in the multi-dimensional constellation design along with the resource allocation strategy. The choice of modulation scheme and SC allocation strategy are static configuration options, thus allowing for PAPR reduction opportunities in SCMA-OFDM systems through the setting of static configuration parameters. Compared to the class of PAPR reduction techniques in the OFDM literature that rely on multiple signalling and probabilistic techniques, these gains come with no computational overhead. In this paper, we also examine these PAPR reduction techniques and their applicability to SCMA-OFDM systems

Cache-Aided Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access

In this paper, we propose a novel joint caching and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme to facilitate advanced downlink transmission for next generation cellular networks. In addition to reaping the conventional advantages of caching and NOMA transmission, the proposed cache-aided NOMA scheme also exploits cached data for interference cancellation which is not possible with separate caching and NOMA transmission designs. Furthermore, as caching can help to reduce the residual interference power, several decoding orders are feasible at the receivers, and these decoding orders can be flexibly selected for performance optimization. We characterize the achievable rate region of cache-aided NOMA and investigate its benefits for minimizing the time required to complete video file delivery. Our simulation results reveal that, compared to several baseline schemes, the proposed cache-aided NOMA scheme significantly expands the achievable rate region for downlink transmission, which translates into substantially reduced file delivery times.Comment: Accepted for presentation at IEEE ICC 201