A Simple Scheme for Realizing the Promised Gains of Downlink Nonorthogonal Multiple Access

• Published in: IEEE transactions on communications Vol. 64; no. 4; pp. 1624 - 1635
• Main Authors: Shieh, Shin-Lin, Huang, Yu-Chih
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.04.2016; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Base stations; Cancellation; capacity region; Codes; Communication channels; Computer simulation; Constants; Decoding; Downlink; Encoding; Gain; linear deterministic model; Multiple access; Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA); OFDM; optimal input distributions; Pulse amplitude modulation; Random variables; Silicon carbide; Turbo codes; linear deterministic model; optimal input distributions; capacity region; Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)
• ISSN: 0090-6778; 1558-0857
• DOI: 10.1109/TCOMM.2016.2533489

In this paper, the downlink nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system is studied where purely discrete input distributions are found that achieve the capacity region to within a constant gap without successive interference cancellation (SIC). The approach is a two-step approach where the corresponding linear deterministic model is first studied and the results are then systematically translated into purely discrete input distributions for the original model. A simple yet powerful coding scheme, which adopts off-the-shelf turbo codes with pulse amplitude modulations (PAM) is then used to simulate the proposed input distributions. Simulation results show that the proposed simple scheme under turbo decoding, both with and without SIC, can operate close to information-theoretic bounds of the proposed input distributions, which lies outside the achievable rate region of any orthogonal multiple access (OMA)-type scheme.