Comparison Of Parallel And Successive Interference Cancellation For Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a promising method for the fifth generation (5G) cellular networks as it provides improved spectral efficiency by multiplexing users in power domain. One key challenge for the receivers in NOMA networks is to distinguish the individual signals that use the same band at the same time. Currently, the two widely discussed decoding schemes are successive interference cancellation (SIC) and parallel interference cancellation (PIC). Both schemes suppress the multi-user interference by subtracting the decoded signals from the received signal based on different algorithms, i.e., SIC decodes iteratively and PIC decodes collectively. This paper compares the computation time of SIC and PIC schemes at the base station and demonstrates multi-thread implementation of PIC.