Comparison study of non-orthogonal multiple access schemes for 5G

Abstract

With the development of mobile Internet and Internet of things (IoT), the 5th generation (5G) wireless communications will foresee explosive 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, multiple access with low-density spreading (LDS), sparse code multiple access (SCMA), multiuser shared access (MUSA), pattern division multiple access (PDMA), etc. Different from conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA) schemes, NOMA can realize overloading by introducing some controllable interferences at the cost of slightly increased receiver complexity, which can achieve significant gains in spectral efficiency and accommodate much more users. In this paper, we will discuss basic principles and key features of three typical NOMA schemes, i.e., SCMA, MUSA, and PDMA. What's more, their performance in terms of uplink bit error rate (BER) will be compared. Simulation results show that in typical Rayleigh fading channels, SCMA has the best performance, while the BER performance of MUSA and PDMA are very close to each other. In addition, we also analyze the performance of PDMA using the same factor graph as SCMA, which indicates that the performance gain of SCMA over PDMA comes from both the difference of factor graph and the codebook optimization.