Channel coding for NOMA schemes with a JD or SIC receiver

In this paper, we investigate the impact of channel coding on two kinds of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) schemes, either with a successive interference cancellation (SIC) receiver or with a joint decoding (JD) receiver. Firstly, the information-theoretic individual achievable signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regions of SIC and JD are analyzed. Then single-user-oriented (SU) code and multi-users-oriented (MU) code are considered for SIC and JD, and the practical individual achievable SNR regions of SIC and JD with these two kinds of channel codes are obtained, which provides an intuitive way to evaluate system performance under different channel conditions and transmission rates. Simulation results show that, the practical boundaries of individual achievable SNR region of SIC generally lie inside the boundaries of JD, as predicted by the theoretical analysis. Moreover, SU code, which is capacity-approaching over point-to-point channel, performs better than MU code for SIC, while the choice of channel codes for JD depends on transmission rates and channel conditions.