Power-Ordered NOMA with Massive MIMO for 5G Systems

The aim of this article is to study the conventional and cooperative power-order Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) using the Single Carrier with Frequency Domain Equalization (SC-FDE) block transmission technique, associated with massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO), evidencing its added value in terms of spectral efficiency of such combined scheme. The new services provided by Fifth Generation of Cellular Communications (5G) are supported by new techniques, such as millimeter waves (mm-wave), alongside the conventional centimeter waves and by massive MIMO (m-MIMO) technology. NOMA is expected to be incorporated in future releases of 5G, as it tends to achieve a capacity gain, highly required for the massive number of Internet of things (IoT) devices, namely to support an efficient reuse of limited spectrum. This article shows that the combination of conventional and cooperative NOMA with m-MIMO and SC-FDE, tends to achieve capacity gains, while the performance only suffers a moderate degradation, being an acceptable alternative for future evolutions of 5G. Moreover, it is shown that Cooperative NOMA tends to outperform Conventional NOMA. Moreover, this article shows that the Maximum Ratio Combiner (MRC) receiver is very well fitted to be combined with NOMA and m-MIMO, as it achieves a good performance while reducing the receiver complexity.