Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) for Cellular Future Radio Access

Abstract

This paper presents a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) concept for cellular future radio access (FRA) towards the 2020s information society. Different from the current LTE radio access scheme (until Release 11), NOMA superposes multiple users in the power domain although its basic signal waveform could be based on the orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) or the discrete Fourier transform (DFT)-spread OFDM the same as LTE baseline. In our concept, NOMA adopts a successive interference cancellation (SIC) receiver as the baseline receiver scheme for robust multiple access, considering the expected evolution of device processing capabilities in the future. Based on system-level evaluations, we show that the downlink NOMA with SIC improves both the capacity and cell-edge user throughput performance irrespective of the availability of the frequency-selective channel quality indicator (CQI) on the base station side. Furthermore, we discuss possible extensions of NOMA by jointly applying multi-antenna/site technologies with a proposed NOMA/MIMO scheme using SIC and an interference rejection combining (IRC) receiver to achieve further capacity gains, e.g., a three-fold gain in the spectrum efficiency representing a challenging target for FRA.