Joint Space-time Coding and Power Domain Non-orthogonal Multiple Access for Future Wireless System

According to information theory, non-orthogonal transmission can achieve the multiple-user channel capacity with an onion-peeling like successive interference cancellation (SIC) based detection followed by a capacity approaching channel code. However, in multiple antenna system, due to the unideal characteristic of the SIC detector, the residual interference propagated to the next detection stage will significantly degrade the detection performance of spatial data layers. To overcome this problem, we proposed a modified power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (P-NOMA) scheme joint designed with space-time coding for multiple input multiple output (MIMO) NOMA system. First, with proper power allocation for each user, inter-user signals can be separated from each other for NOMA detection. Second, a well-designed quasi-orthogonal space-time block code (QO-STBC) was employed to facilitate the SIC-based MIMO detection of spatial data layers within each user. Last, we proposed an optimization algorithm to assign channel coding rates to balance the bit error rate (BER) performance of those spatial data layers for each user. Link-level performance simulation results demonstrate that the proposed time-space-power domain joint transmission scheme performs better than the traditional P-NOMA scheme. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm is of low complexity and easy to implement.