NOMA for multinumerology OFDM systems

Abstract

Nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a promising technique which outperforms the traditional multiple access schemes in many aspects. It uses superposition coding (SC) to share the available resources among the users and adopts successive interference cancelation (SIC) for multiuser detection (MUD). Detection is performed in power domain where fairness can be supported through appropriate power allocation. Since power domain NOMA utilizes SC at the transmitter and SIC at the receiver, users cannot achieve equal rates and experience higher interference. In this paper, a novel NOMA scheme is proposed for multinumerology orthogonal frequency division multiplexing system, that is, different subcarrier spacings. The scheme uses the nature of mixed numerology systems to reduce the constraints associated with the MUD operation. This scheme not only enhances the fairness among the users but improves the bit error rate performance as well. Although the proposed scheme is less spectrally efficient than conventional NOMA schemes, it is still more spectrally efficient than orthogonal multiple access schemes.