A Phase Noise Resistant Constellation Rotation Method and Its Experimental Validation for NOMA Wi-Fi

Abstract

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a well-accepted technology for future Wi-Fi systems to improve spectral efficiency. NOMA allows an access point (AP) to simultaneously serve multiple devices by splitting the transmit power between them. Using the superposition coding the AP combines signals of different frames with predefined power weights. However, as it is already known, the phase noise caused by hardware imperfections limits the performance of NOMA transmissions. The paper proposes a practical, easy-to-implement, and backward-compatible method to rotate the constellation of the low power signal in order to make it more robust to the phase noise. A mathematical model is developed to find such a rotation angle that minimizes the bit error rate (BER) of the low power frame. A new NOMA Wi-Fi prototype testbed is developed with the new feature of constellation rotation ability, which is used to validate the performance of our proposed method. Many experimental results show the proposed constellation rotation approach significantly decreases the BER in high signal-to-noise scenarios.