Multichannel Uplink NOMA Random Access: Selection Diversity and Bistability

The fifth generation (5G) of wireless communication accompanied by the advancement of mobile internet and the Internet of Things (IoT) will create stormy data traffic. The 5G challenges like higher spectral efficiency, massive connectivity, and low latency are addressed by the Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) in recent years. NOMA is proven to be a promising technique from its capability to accommodate a larger number of users in contrast to the conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA) schemes. NOMA comprises two distinct techniques such as Power-Domain NOMA and Code-Domain NOMA. The non-orthogonal resource allocation in Power-Domain NOMA is practically realized by the Superposition Coding (SC) at the Base Station (BS) and an advanced Successive Interference Cancellation at the User Equipment (UE). In this manuscript, the basic concepts of NOMA, on comparing its channel gain with OMA are discussed first. Specifically, a comprehensive survey of various SIC techniques applied under perfect and imperfect Channel State Information (CSI) uncertainties are summarized in terms of outage probability, ergodic capacity, and system performance. In addition, the sophisticated SIC techniques, when NOMA is integrated with modern wireless communication technologies such as multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO-NOMA) and Cooperative (C-NOMA) communications are investigated. Furthermore, the challenges to be solved with their corresponding opportunities and future research directions of NOMA are explored.

NOMA (Non- orthogonal Multiple Access) is an early candidate for 5G that concentrates on networks capacity expansion. It can be broadly classified into two major categories; Power-Domain NOMA (PD-NOMA) and Code-Domain NOMA (CD-NOMA). This research focuses on PD-NOMA. The significance of PD- NOMA is that concurrent transmission and reception can be accomplished on the same frequency and with this spectral efficiency can be enhanced. The objective of this research is to investigate the impact of error propagation caused due to AWGN (Additive White Gaussian Noise) channel in PD-NOMA 5G system. A 2 × 2 PD-NOMA system is simulated in Matlab version 2019a. In the Uplink, the raw data is BPSK modulated and transmitted to the Base Station (BS). In the downlink, from the BS, User 1 data is transmitted with a power level of 0.25 watts and User 2 with 0.75 watts based on their placement. In the Reception section, Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) is executed to segregate the data which is further recovered through decoding process. To analyze the performance, AWGN channel is introduced in the proposed simulated system model. The Signal to Noise Ratio is varied from 5 to 25 dB. From the results obtained, it is inferred that, Bit Error Rate experienced by the users varies from 0.1 to 1.

Multi-carrier based non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is an effective method to meet the ever-increasing demands of both user throughput and energy efficiency by multiplexing multiple users on the same carrier. Since interference from users with a poorer channel gain can be canceled at a user with a strong channel gain by successive interference cancellation, NOMA can enhance the system performance. To improve the downlink system performance, it is crucial to appropriately determine users scheduled on each carrier and power allocation at the base station. However, the existing works are generally either heuristic or local optimal due to the mixed optimization problem. In this paper, we focus on the global optimal solutions to maximize user throughput and energy efficiency in NOMA, respectively. In particular, we first formulate the mixed integer optimization problem which are intractable to be solved. Fortunately, by the provided analytical results, the optimization models can be largely simplified. Then, we propose the architectures of joint user scheduling and power allocation in NOMA, as well as the corresponding optimal algorithms. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithms indeed outperform existing works in terms of the user throughput and energy efficiency, respectively.

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) on shared resources has been identified as a promising technology in 5G to improve resource efficiency and support massive access in all kinds of transmission modes. Power domain and code domain NOMA have been extensively studied and evaluated in both literatures and 3GPP standardization, especially for the uplink where large number of users would like to send their messages to the base station. Though different in the transmitter side design, power domain NOMA and code domain NOMA share the same need of the advanced multi-user detection (MUD) design at the receiver side. Various multi-user detection algorithms have been proposed, balancing performance and complexity in different ways, which is important for the implementation of NOMA in practical networks. In this paper, we introduce a unified variational inference (VI) perspective on various universal NOMA MUD algorithms such as belief propagation (BP), expectation propagation (EP), vector EP (VEP), approximate message passing (AMP) and vector AMP (VAMP), demonstrating how they could be derived from and adapted to each other within the VI framework. Moreover, we unveil and prove that conventional elementary signal estimator (ESE) and linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) receivers are special cases of EP and VEP, respectively, thus bridging the gap between classic linear receivers and message passing based nonlinear receivers. Such a unified perspective would not only help the design and adaptation of NOMA receivers, but also open a door for the systematic design of joint active user detection and multi-user decoding for sporadic grant-free transmission.

In this work, resource allocation of Cooperative Power Domain Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (PD-NOMA) with energy harvesting technique using Multiple Input Single Output (MISO) is examined. This paper focuses on improvement of bit error rate (BER), spectral efficiency and capacity compared to conventional Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA). Two users scenario is considered, where an user is near to the base station (BS) while the other one is far away from the base station. As both users with different power levels exist in the same spectrum, co-channel interference is inevitable. To alleviate this, an interference cancellation technique known as Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) is used. The simulation results of cooperative NOMA with energy harvesting are compared with conventional NOMA and it can be inferred that cooperative NOMA performance is better than NOMA.

In this paper, a unified framework of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) networks is proposed, which can be applied to code-domain NOMA (CD-NOMA) and power-domain 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 considered. To characterize the performance of this unified framework, the exact and asymptotic expressions of outage probabilities as well as delay-limited throughput for CD/PD-NOMA with ipSIC/pSIC are derived. Based on the asymptotic analysis, the diversity orders of CD/PD-NOMA are provided. It is confirmed that due to the impact of residual interference (RI), the outage probability of the n-th user with ipSIC for CD/PD-NOMA converges to an error floor in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the outage behavior of CD-NOMA is superior to that of PD-NOMA.

Power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has become a promising technology to exploit the new dimension of the power domain to enhance the spectral efficiency of wireless networks. However, most existing NOMA schemes rely on the strong assumption that users’ channel gains are quite different, which may be invalid in practice. To unleash the potential of power-domain NOMA, we propose a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-empowered NOMA scheme to introduce desirable channel gain differences among the users by adjusting the phase shifts at the RIS. Our goal is to minimize the total transmit power by jointly optimizing the beamforming vectors at the base station, the phase-shift matrix at the RIS, and user ordering. To address challenge due to the highly coupled optimization variables, we present an alternating optimization framework to decompose the non-convex bi-quadratically constrained quadratic problem under a specific user ordering into two rank-one constrained matrices optimization problems via matrix lifting. To accurately detect the feasibility of the non-convex rank-one constraints and improve performance by avoiding early stopping in the alternating optimization procedure, we equivalently represent the rank-one constraint as the difference between nuclear norm and spectral norm. A difference-of-convex (DC) algorithm is further developed to solve the resulting DC programs via successive convex relaxation, followed by establishing the convergence of the proposed DC-based alternating optimization method. We further propose an efficient user ordering scheme with closed-form expressions, considering both the channel conditions and users’ target data rates. Simulation results validate the ability of an RIS in enlarging the channel-gain difference when the users’ original channel conditions are similar and the superiority of the proposed DC-based alternating optimization method in reducing the total transmit power.

The power domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique introduces one of the fundamental characteristics and it exhibits the possibility of users to decode the messages of the other paired users on the same resources. In cognitive radio inspired NOMA (CR-NOMA), the base station (BS) has to serve untrusted users or users with different security clearance. This phenomenon raises a security threat particularly in such CR-NOMA. This paper develops a tractable analysis framework to evaluate the security performance of cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in cognitive networks, where relay is able to serve two far NOMA users in the presence of external eavesdropper. In particular, we study the secrecy outage probability in a two-user NOMA system. This situation happens in practical the BS is pairing a legitimate user with another untrusted user. Main reason is that the non-uniform distribution in terms of trusted and untrusted users in the cell. By performing numerical results demonstrate the performance improvements of the proposed NOMA scheme in comparison to that of several situations in terms of different parameters. Furthermore, the security performance of NOMA is shown to verify the derived expressions.

The fourth Industrial Revolution is expected to lead to an era of technological innovation and digitization that would require connectivity by the users, anywhere and anytime. The fifth generation of wireless communication systems and the technologies therein are being explored to cater to high connectivity needs that encompass high data rates, very low latencies, energy‐efficient systems, etc. A multiuser environment is anticipated that would require multiple access techniques, such as Nonorthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA). The user data in the power domain NOMA is superimposed, at the transmitter base station, which is in turn subjected to Successive Interference Cancellation at the user end. In the multiuser downlink, the desired user’s signal is subjected to imperfect SIC due to incomplete cancellation of the undesired user’s signal. Pulse‐shaping of NOMA symbols using wavelet transform is proposed to mitigate the multiuser interference due to imperfect SIC. Closed‐form symbol error rate (SER) expression is derived for the wavelet NOMA system for a three‐user scenario. Analytical results show that wavelet transform pulse‐shaped NOMA performs better compared to Fourier transform pulse‐shaped NOMA symbols in mitigating SIC and thereby minimize the residual error due to imperfect SIC.

SummaryThe next generation wireless access technology highly relies on nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique. This paper proposes a novel power domain cyclic spread multiple access (PDCSMA) scheme for the design of NOMA system with power domain superposition coding (SC) and cyclic spreading at the transmitter concurrent with symbol level successive interference cancellation (SL‐SIC) at the receiver. Based on acceptable difference in channel gain, the users are grouped together to form PDCSMA clusters, and the unique power is allotted to each user in a cluster. The user with good channel condition is allotted less power, and the user with poor channel condition is allotted more power. Each PDCSMA cluster has its own spreading code, and the data of every user in a cluster are cyclic spread with the same code. Each cluster supports the number of multipath components equivalent to the length of the spreading code. The use of cyclic spreading makes the signal suffered by multipath fading less prone to intra cluster interference. The user signal is decoded by minimum mean square error‐frequency domain equalization (MMSE‐FDE) or maximal ratio combining (MRC)–based receiver in which weak user is detected with hard decision, and strong user is detected with SIC. Compared with conventional power domain NOMA (PDNOMA) and interleaved NOMA, the proposed PDCSMA achieves better bit error rate (BER) performance and assures guaranteed detection.

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is one of the leading technologies for 5G communication. User pairing (UP) and power allocation (PA) are the key controlling mechanisms for the optimization of the performance of NOMA systems. This paper presents a novel UP and PA (UPPA) technique for capacity and fairness maximization in NOMA called (CFM-UPPA). The impact of the power allocation coefficient and the ratio between the channel gains of the paired users on the sum-rate capacity and the fairness in NOMA is firstly investigated. Then, based on this investigation, the PA and UP algorithms of the CFM-UPPA technique are proposed. The power allocation coefficient of the proposed PA is formulated as an exponentially decaying function of the ratio between the channel gains of the paired users to maximize the capacity and the fairness, and its maximum value is adjusted to guarantee the successive interference cancellation (SIC) constraints. The proposed UP is based on selecting the user that has the highest channel gain per subcarrier as the strong user to maximize the capacity and selecting the user that has the closest lower channel gain to the strong user’s channel gain as the weak user to improve the fairness and capacity. The performance evaluation of the proposed CFM-UPPA technique in terms of capacity, fairness, and outage probability demonstrates that its performance significantly outperforms that of the orthogonal multiple access (OMA) system and that of the NOMA system with random UP. Also, the simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed PA in improving the performance of other UP algorithms, such as the random UP algorithm.

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a rapidly emerging paradigm with the capability to improve the spectral efficiency of data-driven, intelligence inspired, and highly digitized sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks. In the backdrop of ever-evolving NOMA techniques, this article presents a novel resource optimization framework for maximizing the spectral efficiency (SE) of the Internet-of-things (IoT) networks using power domain NOMA. The proposed framework considers a limited number of frequency blocks in the IoT network and provides an optimal power and frequency block allocation method. Different practical constraints like successive interference cancellation (SIC) complexity, ensuring the minimum gap of received power among different IoT equipment over the same frequency block for successful SIC operation, quality of services requirements, and IoT equipment's transmit powers have also been taken into account. Accordingly, a non-convex optimization problem has been formulated for resource management where the objective of spectral efficiency is coupled by both frequency block and power allocation. To effectively solve this problem, the resource optimization problem is decoupled into two subproblems for frequency block assignment and power allocation. A suboptimal algorithm has been designed for frequency block assignment and a new optimal sequential quadratic programming (SQP) approach is employed to solve the non-convex power control subproblem. For the sake of fair comparison, a low complexity suboptimal NOMA power allocation scheme, based on Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions, and conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA) scheme are also provided. The results demonstrate that the proposed optimal resource management scheme significantly improves the system performance compared to other schemes.

In the current passive optical networks (PONs), we address the challenge of dealing with asymmetric channel conditions and asymmetric data rates in order to meet the traffic demand of optical network unit (ONU) to ONU (O2O) communications. A joint network-coding (NC) and power domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) approach (NC-NOMA) is discussed. The novelty of this NC-NOMA scheme lies in the way the inter-ONUs communicates with an optical line terminal (OLT) at different modulation formats. Specifically, in the uplink communications, at each ONU side, multiple data streams from different ONUs are superimposed into one single symbol. Meanwhile, NOMA is considered by adjusting the optical transmission power of ONUs such that the OLT can decode the signals from different ONUs based on successive interference cancellation (SIC). At the OLT side, the adding zeros approach at the specific positions of the shorter bit sequence is introduced. In the downlink communications, the ONUs obtain their own data by decoding the received messages. By applying NC-NOMA, the ONU with better channel condition only needs to demodulate the fictitious symbols with a low order modulation format instead of demodulating the symbols with a high order modulation format. The simulation results show NC-NOMA with hierarchical adding zeros approach outperforms NC-NOMA with traditional zero padding approach in terms of having lower average end-to-end BER of ONUs without having additional complexity.

A network model is considered, where Poisson distributed base stations transmit to N power-domain nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) users (TIEs) each that employ successive interference cancellation (SIC) for decoding. We propose three models for the clustering of NOMA TIEs and consider two different ordering techniques for the NOMA TIEs: mean signal power-based and instantaneous signal-to-intercell-interference-and-noise-ratio-based. For each technique, we present a signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio analysis for the coverage of the typical TIE. We plot the rate region for the two-user case and show that neither ordering technique is consistently superior to the other. We propose two efficient algorithms for finding a feasible resource allocation that maximize the cell sum rate R <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">tot</sub> , for general N, constrained to: 1) a minimum throughput T for each TIE, 2) identical throughput for all TIEs. We show the existence of: 1) an optimum N that maximizes the constrained R <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">tot</sub> given a set of network parameters and 2) a critical SIC level necessary for NOMA to outperform orthogonal multiple access. The results highlight the importance in choosing the network parameters N, the constraints, and the ordering technique to balance the R <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">tot</sub> and fairness requirements. We also show that interference-aware TIE clustering can significantly improve performance.

To improve the throughput per channel in multichannel nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) random access (RA) system, users (re)transmit their packet to one of the channels using transmit power control such that the receive power of the packets at the base station (BS) can be one of the predefined levels called target receive power (TRP). The BS decodes the received packets in the descending order of the TRPs at each slot using successive interference cancellation (SIC). This work proposes the real-time transmission algorithm for users to (re)transmit their packet for maximization of the system throughput. To do this, the BS estimates the number of backlogged users in real time and adjusts and broadcasts the throughput-optimal (re)transmission probability in the algorithm. We analyze the average RA delay performance of the proposed algorithm and demonstrate its performance even with time-varying traffic.