The optimum received power levels of uplink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) signals

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been recently considered as a promising multiple access technique for fifth generation (5G) mobile networks as an enabling technology to meet the demands of low latency, high reliability, massive connectivity, and high throughput. The two dominants types of NOMA are: power-domain and code-domain. The key feature of power-domain NOMA is to allow different users to share the same time, frequency, and code, but with different power levels. In code-domain NOMA, different spread-spectrum codes are assigned to different users and are then multiplexed over the same time-frequency resources. This paper concentrates on power-domain NOMA. In power-domain NOMA, Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) is employed at the receiver. In this paper, the optimum received uplink power levels using a SIC detector is determined analytically for any number of transmitters. The optimum uplink received power levels using the SIC decoder in NOMA strongly resembles the μ-law encoding used in pulse code modulation (PCM) speech companders.