A unified framework for non-orthogonal multiple access

Abstract

This paper proposes a unified framework of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) networks. Stochastic geometry is employed to model the locations of spatially NOMA users. The proposed unified NOMA framework is capable of being applied to both code-domain NOMA (CD-NOMA) and power-domain NOMA (PD-NOMA). Since the detection of NOMA users mainly depend on efficient successive interference cancelation (SIC) schemes, both imperfect SIC (ipSIC) and perfect SIC (pSIC) are taken into account. To characterize the performance of the proposed unified NOMA framework, the exact and asymptotic expressions of outage probabilities as well as delay-limited throughput for CD/PD-NOMA with ipSIC/pSIC are derived. In order to obtain more insights, the diversity analysis of a pair of NOMA users (i.e., the nth user and mth user) is provided. Our analytical results reveal that: 1) the diversity orders of mth and nth user with pSIC for CD-NOMA are mK and nK, respectively; 2) due to the influence of residual interference, the nth user with ipSIC obtains a zero diversity order; and 3) the diversity order is determined by the user who has the poorer channel conditions out of the pair. Finally, Monte Carlo simulations are presented to verify the analytical results: 1) when the number of subcarriers becomes lager, the NOMA users are capable of achieving more steep slope in terms of outage probability and 2) the outage behavior of CD-NOMA is superior to that of PD-NOMA.