NOMA assisted joint broadcast and multicast transmission in 5G networks

In this paper, we employ the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique to convey joint broadcast and multicast streams to a set of users. Thanks to the spatial beamforming, different groups of users is able to receive different streams in addition to the common broadcast information. With the proposed scheme, the same time-frequency resources can be shared between different streams, without requiring additional bandwidth. The transmitter implementation is presented and two receiver classes are considered based on Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) and Joint Decoding (JD) approaches. In addition to the performance assessment via simulation, a real hardware proof of concept implementation of the proposed technique is performed in order to show the practical viability of the proposed scheme.