A Survey of Existing Studies on NOMA Application to Multi-beam Satellite Systems for 5G

Abstract

The non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technology and the satellite communication systems have been identified as key enabling technologies for the achievement of the fifth-generation (5G) networks. There are ongoing researches about the implementation of 5G networks, and more precisely, employing NOMA technology. While most existing survey papers on NOMA-based 5G networks’ studies focus mainly on terrestrial networks, this paper provides a comprehensive survey of NOMA-based satellite network studies for 5G. More precisely, this article gives an up-to-date survey of studies that have investigated the performances (ergodic capacity, outage probability, secrecy rate, etc.) of NOMA-based satellite networks. It also gives a survey of studies that have designed network components such as power allocation algorithms or pre-coding algorithms for NOMA-based satellite networks. The surveys presented reveal that the field of NOMA application to satellite networks for 5G is still relatively new, and therefore, holds many interesting topics opened for future research.