On Power Splitting under User-Fairness for Correlated Superposition Coding NOMA in 5G System

Abstract

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has gained the significant attention in the fifth generation (5G) mobile communication, which enables the advanced smart convergence of the artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things (IoT), and many of the state-of-the-art technologies. Recently, correlated superposition coding (SC) has been proposed in NOMA, to achieve the near-perfect successive interference cancellation (SIC) bit-error rate (BER) performance for the stronger channel users, and to mitigate the severe BER performance degradation for the weaker channel users. In the correlated SC NOMA scheme, the stronger channel user BER performance is even better than the perfect SIC BER performance, for some range of the power allocation factor. However, such excessively good BER performance is not good for the user-fairness, i.e., the more power to the weaker channel user and the less power to the stronger channel user, because the excessively good BER performance of the stronger channel user results in the worse BER performance of the weaker channel user. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the power splitting to establish the user-fairness between both users. First, we derive a closed-form expression for the power splitting factor. Then it is shown that in terms of BER performance, the user-fairness is established between the two users. In result, the power splitting scheme could be considered in correlated SC NOMA for the user-fairness.