BER performances of downlink and uplink NOMA in the presence of SIC errors over fading channels

Abstract

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a strong candidate for next generation radio access networks due to its ability of serving multiple users using the same time and frequency resources. Therefore, researchers in academia and industry have been recently investigating the error performances and capacity of NOMA schemes. The main drawback of NOMA techniques is the interference among users due to the its non-orthogonal access nature, that is usually solved by interference cancellation techniques such as successive interference cancellation (SIC) at the receivers. On the other hand, the interference among users may not be completely eliminated in the SIC process due to the erroneous decisions in the receivers usually caused by channels. In this study, for the first time in the literature, the authors derive an exact closed-form bit error rate (BER) expressions under SIC error for downlink NOMA over Rayleigh fading channels. Besides, they derive one-degree integral form exact BER expressions and closed-form approximate expressions for uplink NOMA. Then, the derived expressions are validated by simulations. The numerical results are depicted to reveal the effects of error during SIC process on the performance for various cases such as power allocation for downlink and channel quality difference for uplink.