A Unified Framework for Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access

Yue, Xinwei and Qin, Zhijin and Liu, Yuanwei and Kang, Shaoli and Chen, Yue (2018) A Unified Framework for Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 66 (11). pp. 5346-5359. ISSN 0090-6778

Abstract

This paper proposes a unified framework of nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) networks. Stochastic geometry is employed to model the locations of spatially NOMA users. The proposed unified NOMA framework is capable of being applied to both code-domain NOMA (CD-NOMA) and powerdomain NOMA (PD-NOMA). Since the detection of NOMA users mainly depend on efficient successive interference cancellation (SIC) schemes, both imperfect SIC (ipSIC) and perfect SIC (pSIC) are taken into account. To characterize the performance of the proposed unified NOMA framework, the exact and asymptotic expressions of outage probabilities as well as delay-limited throughput for CD/PD-NOMA with ipSIC/pSIC are derived. In order to obtain more insights, the diversity analysis of a pair of NOMA users (i.e., the n-th user and m-th user) are provided. Our analytical results reveal that: i) The diversity orders of the m-th and n-th user with pSIC for CD-NOMA are mK and nK, respectively; ii) Due to the influence of residual interference (RI), the n-th user with ipSIC obtains a zero diversity order; and iii) The diversity order is determined by the user who has the poorer channel conditions out of the pair. Finally, Monte Carlo simulations are presented to verify the analytical results: i) When the number of subcarriers becomes lager, the NOMA users are capable of achieving more steep slope in terms of outage probability; and ii) The outage behavior of CD-NOMA is superior to that of PD-NOMA.