Downlink and Uplink Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access in a Dense Wireless Network

Abstract

To address the ever increasing high data rate and connectivity requirements in the next generation 5G wireless network, novel radio access technologies (RATs) are actively explored to enhance the system spectral efficiency and connectivity. As a promising RAT for 5G cellular networks, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has attracted extensive research attentions. Compared with the orthogonal multiple access (OMA) that has been widely applied in existing wireless communication systems, NOMA possesses the potential to further improve the system spectral efficiency and connectivity capability. This paper develops analytical frameworks for NOMA downlink and uplink multi-cell wireless systems to evaluate the system outage probability and average achievable rate. In the downlink NOMA system, two different NOMA group pairing schemes are considered, based on which theoretical results on outage and achievable data rates are derived. In the uplink NOMA, revised back-off power control scheme is applied, and outage probability and per UE average achievable rate are derived. As wireless networks turn into more and more densely deployed, inter-cell interference has become a dominant capacity limiting factor but has not been addressed in most of the existing NOMA studies. In this paper, a stochastic geometry approach is used to model a dense wireless system, that supports NOMA on both uplink and downlink, based on which analytical results are derived either in pseudo-closed forms or succinct closed forms and are further validated by simulations. Numerical results demonstrate that NOMA can bring considerable system-wide performance gain compared with OMA on both uplink and downlink when properly designed.