Study of Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access Technology for Satellite Communications

In this paper, the availability of the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) to the satellite communication system is verified firstly by analyzing the distribution of the absolute value of any two satellite users' signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gap. Then, the uplink and downlink NOMA schemes which are suitable for the satellite communications are studied. Finally, the link-level simulation is carried out under the satellite channel. The simulation results show that compared with the orthogonal multiple access (OMA), NOMA performs better in the satellite communication systems.