Non-orthogonal multiple access with joint maximum likelihood detection in heterogeneous network

As one of the key technologies in the fifth-generation mobile communication system, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been investigated. In NOMA, multiple terminals are assigned the same frequency resources by a scheduler on the basis of the difference in propagation losses between a base station and user terminals. Each terminal cancels the signals for the other terminals and extracts its desired signal. On the other hand, the application of joint maximum likelihood (ML) detection to overloaded signals has also been investigated, and joint ML detection can be applied to a NOMA downlink. In this paper, the effect of joint ML detection in a heterogeneous NOMA network is presented. The numerical results obtained through system-level simulation show that joint ML detection in a heterogeneous NOMA downlink can effectively offload mobile traffic from a macro base station to a pico base station. It is shown that a heterogeneous NOMA network with joint ML detection improves the throughput performance by 0.2 bit/user/subcarrier as compared to that without joint ML detection at a cumulative probability of 0.5. The system throughput is also increased about twofold with joint ML detection.