Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) to Enhance Capacity in 5G

Abstract

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) where all users share the entire time and frequency resource has paid attention as one of the key technologies to enhance the spectral efficiency and the total throughput. Nevertheless, as the number of users and SIC error increase, the inter-user interference and the residual interference due to the SIC error also increase, resulting in performance degradation. In order to mitigate the performance degradation, we propose grouping-based NOMA system. In the proposed scheme, all users are divided into two groups based on the distance between the BS and each user, where one utilizes the first half of the bandwidth and the other utilizes the rest in the orthogonal manner. On the other hand, users in each group share the spectrum in the non-orthogonal manner. Grouping users can reduce both the inter-user interference and residual interference due to the SIC error, so it can outperform conventional NOMA system, especially in case that the number of users and the SIC error increase. Based on that, we also present the hybrid operation of the conventional and the proposed NOMA systems. In numerical results, the total throughput of the proposed NOMA systems is compared with that of the conventional NOMA systems with regard to the number of users and SIC error. It is confirmed that the proposed NOMA system outperforms the conventional NOMA system as the number of users and the SIC error increase.