A NOMA Scheme for a Two-User MISO Downlink Channel With Unknown CSIT

Abstract

The notion of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) for 5G essentially relies on the availability of the channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT). Such knowledge is used to judiciously allocate power among users to make their signals separable at their respective receivers while employing successive interference cancellation (SIC). Feeding back the CSI from the users to the BS (transmitter) is obviously bandwidth consuming. Reducing such an overhead is of great importance and has been of interest in recent years. Furthermore, existing NOMA techniques become inapplicable when the CSI is unavailable at the BS. In this case, the BS has only the option of allocating power among users blindly, including equal power splitting, which has been shown to yield poor performance in terms of outage probability and error probability. This motivates us to develop a NOMA scheme that does not require CSI knowledge at the BS. We make use of a nonlinear interference alignment technique that we have proposed recently, namely, interference dissolution, to develop the proposed NOMA scheme, which allows the BS to communicate with two users simultaneously while keeping signals perfectly separable at their respective receivers. We develop the proposed scheme for multiple-input single-output and single-input single-output downlink channels. We analyze the proposed technique analytically in terms of the achievable degrees-of-freedom and achievable rate per user. We show that the proposed NOMA scheme outperforms existing NOMA techniques in terms of the outage probability and error probability.