Non-orthogonal Multiple Access with Practical Interference Cancellation for MIMO Systems

The concept of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is presented as a candidate radio access technology for systems beyond the 4th generation (4G) mobile communication systems. NOMA, which is different from the current long term evolution (LTE) radio access schemes, utilizes the power domain for user multiplexing at the transmitter side and adopts a successive interference cancellation (SIC) receiver as the baseline receiver scheme considering the expected mobile device evolution in the future. In this paper, we investigate the link-level performance of NOMA in the cellular downlink multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems by taking into account the practical ordered SIC (OSIC) schemes. The goal is to clarify the performance gap of NOMA scheme with the ideal and practical SIC, and to examine the possibility of applying practical NOMA with SIC to the cellular systems in the near future.