Abstract. With the advent of new use-cases requiring high reliability and low-latency, transmission with finite blocklength becomes inevitable to reduce latency. In contrast to classical information-theoretic principles, the use of finite blocklength results in a non-negligible decoder error probability. Hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) procedures are used to improve the accuracy in decoding by exploiting time-diversity at the expense of increased latency. Thus, achieving high reliability and low-latency are Pareto-optimal, which calls for a trade-off between the two. Concurrently, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has gained widespread attention in research due to the ability to outperform its counterpart, orthogonal multiple access (OMA) in terms of spectral efficiency and user fairness.
This thesis investigates the performance of a two-user downlink NOMA system using HARQ with chase combining (HARQ-CC) in finite blocklength unifying the three enablers. First, an analytical framework is developed by deriving closed-form approximations for the individual average block error rate (BLER) of the near and the far user. Based upon that, the performance of NOMA is discussed in comparison to OMA, which draws the conclusion that NOMA outperforms OMA in terms of user fairness. Further, asymptotic expressions for average BLER are derived, which are used to devise an algorithm to determine such minimum blocklength and power allocation coefficients for NOMA that satisfies reliability targets for the users. NOMA has a lower blocklength in high transmit signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions, leading to lower latency than OMA when reliability requirements in terms of BLER for the two users are in the order of 10^(-5)
