Improving NOMA Multi-Carrier Systems with Intentional Frequency Offsets

In this letter, we investigate the possible benefits of asynchrony in the frequency domain for the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) schemes. Despite the common perspective that asynchrony in transmission or reception of multi-stream signals is harmful, we demonstrate the advantages of adding intentional frequency offset to the conventional power domain-NOMA (P-NOMA). We introduce two methods which add artificial frequency offsets between different sets of sub-carriers destined for different users. The first one uses the same successive interference cancellation (SIC) method as the conventional P-NOMA except that it enjoys reduced inter-user interference (IUI) between interfering sub-carriers. The second scheme adopts a precoding at the base station and a linear preprocessing scheme at the receiving user. It decomposes the broadcast channel into parallel channels circumventing the need for SIC. As a result, it fully exploits the advantages provided by the frequency asynchrony and enables the interference-free transmission to the users. The numerical results show that both methods can outperform the conventional P-NOMA

Diversity-Multiplexing Tradeoff of Asynchronous Cooperative Diversity in Wireless Networks

Synchronization of relay nodes is an important and critical issue in exploiting cooperative diversity in wireless networks. In this paper, two asynchronous cooperative diversity schemes are proposed, namely, distributed delay diversity and asynchronous space-time coded cooperative diversity schemes. In terms of the overall diversity-multiplexing (DM) tradeoff function, we show that the proposed independent coding based distributed delay diversity and asynchronous space-time coded cooperative diversity schemes achieve the same performance as the synchronous space-time coded approach which requires an accurate symbol-level timing synchronization to ensure signals arriving at the destination from different relay nodes are perfectly synchronized. This demonstrates diversity order is maintained even at the presence of asynchronism between relay node. Moreover, when all relay nodes succeed in decoding the source information, the asynchronous space-time coded approach is capable of achieving better DM-tradeoff than synchronous schemes and performs equivalently to transmitting information through a parallel fading channel as far as the DM-tradeoff is concerned. Our results suggest the benefits of fully exploiting the space-time degrees of freedom in multiple antenna systems by employing asynchronous space-time codes even in a frequency flat fading channel. In addition, it is shown asynchronous space-time coded systems are able to achieve higher mutual information than synchronous space-time coded systems for any finite signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) when properly selected baseband waveforms are employed

Energy-Efficient Communication over the Unsynchronized Gaussian Diamond Network

Communication networks are often designed and analyzed assuming tight synchronization among nodes. However, in applications that require communication in the energy-efficient regime of low signal-to-noise ratios, establishing tight synchronization among nodes in the network can result in a significant energy overhead. Motivated by a recent result showing that near-optimal energy efficiency can be achieved over the AWGN channel without requiring tight synchronization, we consider the question of whether the potential gains of cooperative communication can be achieved in the absence of synchronization. We focus on the symmetric Gaussian diamond network and establish that cooperative-communication gains are indeed feasible even with unsynchronized nodes. More precisely, we show that the capacity per unit energy of the unsynchronized symmetric Gaussian diamond network is within a constant factor of the capacity per unit energy of the corresponding synchronized network. To this end, we propose a distributed relaying scheme that does not require tight synchronization but nevertheless achieves most of the energy gains of coherent combining.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, presented at IEEE ISIT 201

Asynchronous CDMA Systems with Random Spreading-Part I: Fundamental Limits

Spectral efficiency for asynchronous code division multiple access (CDMA) with random spreading is calculated in the large system limit allowing for arbitrary chip waveforms and frequency-flat fading. Signal to interference and noise ratios (SINRs) for suboptimal receivers, such as the linear minimum mean square error (MMSE) detectors, are derived. The approach is general and optionally allows even for statistics obtained by under-sampling the received signal. All performance measures are given as a function of the chip waveform and the delay distribution of the users in the large system limit. It turns out that synchronizing users on a chip level impairs performance for all chip waveforms with bandwidth greater than the Nyquist bandwidth, e.g., positive roll-off factors. For example, with the pulse shaping demanded in the UMTS standard, user synchronization reduces spectral efficiency up to 12% at 10 dB normalized signal-to-noise ratio. The benefits of asynchronism stem from the finding that the excess bandwidth of chip waveforms actually spans additional dimensions in signal space, if the users are de-synchronized on the chip-level. The analysis of linear MMSE detectors shows that the limiting interference effects can be decoupled both in the user domain and in the frequency domain such that the concept of the effective interference spectral density arises. This generalizes and refines Tse and Hanly's concept of effective interference. In Part II, the analysis is extended to any linear detector that admits a representation as multistage detector and guidelines for the design of low complexity multistage detectors with universal weights are provided