Capacity Comparison between MIMO-NOMA and MIMO-OMA with Multiple Users in a Cluster

In this paper, the performance of multiple-input multiple-output non-orthogonal multiple access (MIMO-NOMA) is investigated when multiple users are grouped into a cluster. The superiority of MIMO-NOMA over MIMO orthogonal multiple access (MIMO-OMA) in terms of both sum channel capacity and ergodic sum capacity is proved analytically. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the more users are admitted to a cluster, the lower is the achieved sum rate, which illustrates the tradeoff between the sum rate and maximum number of admitted users. On this basis, a user admission scheme is proposed, which is optimal in terms of both sum rate and number of admitted users when the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio thresholds of the users are equal. When these thresholds are different, the proposed scheme still achieves good performance in balancing both criteria. Moreover, under certain conditions,it maximizes the number of admitted users. In addition, the complexity of the proposed scheme is linear to the number of users per cluster. Simulation results verify the superiority of MIMO-NOMA over MIMO-OMA in terms of both sum rate and user fairness, as well as the effectiveness of the proposed user admission scheme.Comment: accepted IEEE Journal on Selected Topics in Communications, June 2017, Keywords: Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), channel capacity, sum rate, fairness, user admission, power allocatio

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

A Fair Individual Rate Comparison between MIMO-NOMA and MIMO-OMA

In this paper, we compare the individual rate of MIMO-NOMA and MIMO-OMA when users are paired into clusters. A power allocation (PA) strategy is proposed, which ensures that MIMO-NOMA achieves a higher individual rate for each user than MIMO-OMA with arbitrary PA and optimal degrees of freedom split. In addition, a special case with equal degrees of freedom and arbitrary PA for OMA is considered, for which the individual rate superiority of NOMA still holds. Moreover, it is shown that NOMA can attain better fairness through appropriate PA. Finally, simulations are carried out, which validate the developed analytical results

Performance analysis of spatial modulation aided NOMA with full-duplex relay

A spatial modulation aided non-orthogonal multiple access with full-duplex relay (SM-NOMA-FDR) scheme is proposed for the coordinated direct and relay transmission in this paper. Specifically, the signal of the near user is mapped to an M-ary modulated symbol and the signal of the far user is mapped to an SM symbol. The base station first transmits signals to the near user and relay via SM-NOMA, and then the relay decodes and retransmits the signal of the far user. An SM-assisted FDR is used in this scheme to improve the spectral efficiency while reducing energy consumption and making full use of the antenna resources at the relay, since SM only activates one antenna in each transmission. We derive the ergodic capacity and bit error rate of the proposed scheme over independent Rayleigh fading channels. Numerical results validate the accuracy of the theoretical analysis and show the superior performance of the proposed SM-NOMA-FDR scheme