Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) as a Potential Candidate for Future Radio

Access Technologies

Bahri S1, Izzaddin M2, Shukor M3

1
Jabatan Kejuruteraan Elektrik, Politeknik Merlimau Melaka, Merlimau, 77300, Malaysia; syamsulbahri@pmm.edu.my
2
Unit Sistem Rangkaian & Komputer, Kolej Komuniti Jasin, Merlimau, 77300, Malaysia, izzaddin@kkjs.edu.my
3
Jabatan Kejuruteraan Elektrik, Politeknik Merlimau Melaka, Merlimau, 77300, Malaysia; mohamadshukor@pmm.edu.my

Abstract This article presents a review of the Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) as a promising candidate mul-
tiple access technology for the preparation development of Internet of things (IoT) and the 5th generation (5G) wireless
communications. The Non-orthogonal multiple access or NOMA utilizing the power domain and advanced receiver to ad-
dress the challenges in 5G technologies such as higher spectral efficiency, massive connectivity, and lower latency in radio
access technologies. The key components technologies of NOMA are presented and discussed to compare between other
candidates and enclose the benefit of NOMA including the basic principles of NOMA techniques.

Keywords Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA), 5G, IoT.

hancement of gains in capacity and system throughput per-

1. Introduction
In 2014, IMT-2020 Group has been proposed in the white
paper 5G vision and demand that the future mobile commu-
nication system (5G) will solve 1000 times or more the
need for greater capacity, 10-100 times the mass device
connections, 5-15 times improvement of the spectral effi-
ciency compared to 4G, spectrum resources scarcity prob-
lems etc. (Saito. et al., 2013). The future 5G includes the
3-fold enhancement in the spectrum efficiency compared to
the LTE baseline or 10 fold compared to 3G HSPA.
Now, many research projects toward 5G have been al-
ready started in worldwide. The targets of 5G are high sys-
tem capacity, high user rate e.g. 1Gbps in everywhere and
10Gbps as a peak rate, massive device connectivity consid-
ering the accommodation of IoT (Internet of Thing) devices,
and low latency (less than 1ms over radio access network or
RAN). Figure 1 illustrates the 3GPP standardization year’s
development stage from LTE/LTE-A to beyond 5G. Its
shows for incoming year 2020, the standardization of 5G
will be finalized for 3GPP Release 14.
To meet these requirements, three approaches can be
considered. One is to use wider bandwidth in high frequen-
cy bands. For instance, 10Gbps transmission has been
achieved by using 400MHz bandwidth at 11GHz band
(Kayama, et. al, 2014). Another one is the dense deploy-
ments of small/femto cells. However, such a high dense cell
structure may cause severe interference among cells, and
application of massive MIMO is one of promising ways to
eliminate such interference with its high freedom and sharp
beam. It can also enhance the range between base stations
and user equipment’s or UEs by concentrating the energy on
the narrow beam. Thus, the third approach for achieving the
5G target is the application of new radio access technolo-
gies for higher spectrum efficiency.
Therefore in future radio access technologies, the en-
formance is important in order to accommodate increasing
volume of mobile traffic and services such video streaming
and cloud computing. Thus, to ensure the sustainability of
3GPP RAT over the coming decade, new concept of fre-
quency radio access or FRA must be identified and provid-
ed to respond the future challenges.
In this article, we present the basic comparison of new
radio access technologies and the basic principles and bene-
fit of Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) as a new
potential candidate of multiple access techniques used for
cellular and wireless communication system. The article is
organized as follows. We first present the comparison study
for all new multiple access technique proposed for future
MA; next, we present the benefit and principles of
Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access, and then conclude the
finding in the end of the article.
Figure 1. 3GPP standardization year’s development stage from
LTE/LTE-A to beyond 5G
2. Comparison Study
In general, the multiple access techniques can be classi-
fied into orthogonal and non-orthogonal approaches. In
orthogonal approaches, signals from different users are not
overlapped with each other, which can be achieved by time
division multiple-access (TDMA), frequency division mul- of three typical NOMA schemes, i.e., SCMA, MUSA, and
tiple access (FDMA) and orthogonal frequency division PDMA. It is found that SCMA has the best performance
multiple access (OFDMA). Non-orthogonal schemes allow due to the near-optimal design of sparse codewords together
overlapping among the signals from different users by ex- with the near-optimal MPA receiver, while MUSA and
ploiting power domain, code domain or interleaver pattern, PDMA have very similar performance.
etc., and thus can provide better performance than the or-
thogonal counterparts.
Multiple access technology derived from the pioneering
contributions of Shannon theory is a key feature for modern
wireless communications. Previously in 1G, multiple access
technology is FDMA (Frequency Division Multiple Access)
based on the analog frequency modulation. With the arrival
of the digital age, TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access)
based on the digital modulation emerged. Although 2G em- Figure 2. Simple comparison of NOMA and OMA (OFDMA) (Tao, et. al,
ployed both FDMA and TDMA for multiple accesses, it was 2015)
generally known as TDMA due to the novelty of time mul-
tiplexing. 3G is about CDMA (Code Division Multiple Ac-
cess) era, which makes use of the orthogonality of code-
word spreading sequences to solve the problem of massive
user access. Due to the significant problem of spectrum
resources scarcity and dramatic increase of number of users,
4G introduced OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division
Multiplexing) on the basis of CDMA. The OFDMA (Or-
thogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access) was pro-
posed to improve the spectral efficiency and solve the
problem of massive user connections.
Currently the key multiple access schemes are still under
discussion, all companies are proposing their technology
solutions to obtain industry recognition, so that they have
the right to speak in striving setting 5G standards. One of
the candidates is NOMA which stands for Non-orthogonal
Multiple Access. NOMA utilizes non-orthogonal transmis- Figure 3. BER performance comparison of SCMA, MUSA, and PDMA
sion on the transmitter side so that it would intentionally in Rayleigh fading channels (Wang, et. al, 2015)
introduce intra-cell and/or inter-cell interference. On the
receiver side, multi-user signal separation is conducted In Figure 2 it shows the result of multiple configurations
based on successive interference cancellation (SIC). The that the cell throughput achieved by NOMA is higher by
basic principle of NOMA is to boost further the spectrum more than 30% compared to OMA (OFDMA). Meanwhile
efficiency by increasing the complexity of receiver. With in Figure 3, it shows that SCMA has the best BER perfor-
the evolution of device processing capabilities, it will be- mance, MUSA and PDMA have very similar BER perfor-
come possible to use NOMA in future practical systems. mance (Wang, et. al, 2015). This results is caused by the
Besides NOMA, there are other multiple access schemes fact that error propagation of SIC receivers has a severe
forcing to between themselves to become a candidate effect on the system performance.
scheme for future 5G i.e., Sparse Code Multiple Access
(SCMA); Multi-user Shared Access (MUSA); Pattern Divi- Table 1. Key technologies of four multiple access schemes (Tao, et. al,
sion Multiple Access (PDMA); Filter-bank based Multicar- 2015)
rier (FBMC); Universal Filtered Multi-Carrier (UFMC) and Features Key technologies
Generalized Frequency Division Multiplexing (GFDM) NOMA (1) SIC detection.
(Wang, et. al, 2015). Among available NOMA technologies, (2) Power domain multiplexing.
SCMA, MUSA, and PDMA are three typical schemes re- SCMA (1) Low density spreading.
cently proposed. In SCMA, bit streams are directly mapped (2) High-dimensional modulation technique.
to sparse codewords, and thus it is available to use (3) Near-optimal detection feasible through itera-
near-optimal multi-user detection (MUD) based on message tive message passing algorithm (MPA).
passing algorithm (MPA) with acceptable complexity MUSA (1) SIC detection.
(Kschischang, et. al, 2001). MUSA uses low-correlation (2) Multi-codes of complex domain.
spreading sequences at the transmitter, and successive in- (3) Superposition coding and superposition sym-
terference cancellation (SIC) is performed at the receiver to bol expansion technology.
realize MUD (Cho, et. al, 2010). While in PDMA, PDMA (1) Joint/holistic design of SIC amenable pattern.
non-orthogonal patterns are designed to maximize the di- (2) Low-complexity quasi ML SIC detection.
versity and minimize the overlaps of multiple users (Zeng,
et. al, 2015). Wang in 2013 has evaluated the performance
 Table 2. Comparison of four multiple access schemes (Tao, et. al, 2015) ple access interference in CDMA, it is a gradual
Features Advantages Disadvantages interference elimination strategy.
NOMA (1) No apparent near-far effect. (1) Receiver is rather ii. NOMA is a multiplexing scheme that utilizes
(2) Improve uplink spectral effi- complex. the power domain which is not sufficiently
ciency by nearly 20%. (2) the power-domain utilized in previous systems. It is different
(3) Improve downlink throughput multiplexing technology from the simple power control, but power dis-
by more than 30%. is on the research stage tribution by the base station is conducted ac-
SCMA (1) Improve spectral efficiency 3 (1) Difficult to achieve cording to the related algorithm.
times or more. the design and optimi-
(2) Uplink system capacity up- zation of the code.
grade around 2.8 times over (2) Interference between
OFDM. users increasing.
(3) Downlink cell throughput and
coverage gain over OFDMA by
5% and 8%, respectively.
MUSA (1) Low block error rate. (1) Interference between
(2) Supporting large numbers of users increasing.
users access. (2) Difficult to achieve
(3) Improve the spectral efficien- the design of spread
cy. symbols.
Figure 4. NOMA applying SIC at UE receiver in downlink
PDMA (1) Improving capacity above 2-3 (1) Difficult to achieve
times in uplink system. the design and optimi-
(2) Improving the spectral effi- zation of the pattern.
Compared to CDMA and OFDMA, NOMA utilizes or-
ciency above 1.5 times in down- (2) Interference between
thogonal transmission between the sub channels, there’s no
link system. users increasing.
apparent near-far effect which is obsession in 3G is less
severe. The most important is that the same channel can be
Table 1 and 2 describes the features of the four multiple shared by multiple users, thus NOMA can improve the
access schemes; NOMA, SCMA, MUSA and PDMA. It can spectrum efficiency at the same transmission speed com-
be apparently obtained that all four schemes achieve spec- pared to 4G. On the other hand, NOMA is still facing some
tral efficiency improvement and system capacity enhance- problems in technical implementation. Firstly, the
ment as well. Meanwhile, each of them should respectively non-orthogonal transmission receiver is rather complex,
address interference problems and some complex technolo- SIC receiver design requires improvement in signal pro-
gies which are difficult to implement. Table 2 shows that cessing chip technology. Secondly, the power-domain mul-
the NOMA improves the spectral efficiency near 20% and tiplexing technology is on the research stage, and there is
throughput more than 30% than others proposed scheme. still plenty of work to do. NOMA can realize overloading
by introducing some controllable interference at the cost of
slightly increased receiver complexity.
3. Benefits and Principles Many benefits in NOMA include;
(i) Improved spectrum efficiency and system through-
Non-orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) is a new and put: the channel gain difference among users is
different current LTE radio access (beyond Release 11) translated into multiplexing gain by utilizing the
concept used for cellular future radio access (FRA). NOMA non-orthogonal multiplexing.
superposes two users in power domain from basic signal (ii) Robust performance gain in high mobility scenarios:
waveform base on orthogonal frequency multiple access orthogonal MA (e.g. OFDMA) obtains almost no
(OFDMA) or the discrete Fourier transform (DFT)-spread frequency-domain scheduling gain in high mobility
OFDM. Conceptually, NOMA use a successive interference scenarios as CSI becomes outdated. NOMA mainly
cancellation (SIC) receiver for incoming multiple access. relies on CSI at receiver side and thus can provide
Saito, et. al (2013) shows by using system level evaluation gains even in high mobility scenarios.
the downlink NOMA with SIC improves both capacity and (iii) No need to increase number of transmits antennas: It
cell-edge user throughput performance irrespective of fre- is quite important from the perspective of cost and
quency-selective channel quality indicator (CQI) perfor- space limitations of small cells and macro cell de-
mance on the base station. Saito, et. al (2013) also propose ployments in nowadays practical network.
the possibility extensions of NOMA/MIMO scheme using (iv) Good backward compatibility with OFDMA and
SIC and an interference rejection combining (IRC) receiver SC-FDMA: NOMA can be easily applied on the top
to achieve further capacity gains representing a challenging of OFDMA for downlink and SCFDMA for uplink.
target for FRA. (v) Good affinity with multi-antenna technology: NO-
There are two key technologies contained in NOMA. MA can be easily combined with beamforming and
i. On the user equipment (UE) receiver side, NOMA SU/MU MIMO techniques to boost system perfor-
utilizes SIC to conduct multi-user detection as mance.
Fig.4 illustrated. Like methods to eliminate multi- To achieve NOMA while maintaining backward compat-
ibility with OFDMA, successive interference cancellation
(SIC) has resurfaced. SIC was proposed as a multi-user
detection technique for early CDMA systems (Hui, et. al,
2008), it has recently found new applications for enabling
NOMA in OFDMA systems.
ment of mobile Internet and Internet of things (IoT), the 5th
generation (5G) wireless communications will foresee ex-
plosive increase in mobile traffic. To address challenges in
5G such as higher spectral efficiency, massive connectivity,
and lower latency, some non-orthogonal multiple access
(NOMA) schemes have been recently actively investigated,
including power-domain NOMA. In general, three dimen-
sions of radio resource (frequency, time and space) are ex-
ploited to multiplex signals. While NOMA uses power di-
mension multiplexing like CDMA. However, it utilizes the
inherent received power difference caused by the path loss
difference, and doesn’t need spreading signals or strict
power control like CDMA. Instead, SIC (Serial Interference
Cancellation) is used to eliminate stronger signals and de-
tect a weak signal which is superimposed on the stronger
signals.

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