Analysis and Evaluation of Pattern Division Multiple Access Scheme Jointed with 5G Waveforms

Nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) techniques represent a key feature for 5G systems in order to increase multiple users' systems' capacity. In particular, we propose, for study, a pattern division multiple access (PDMA) technique, which defines a pattern matrix used for mapping the users to a group of resource elements that might be shared by multiple users. The contribution of this paper is the analysis of the performances, in terms of bit error rate (BER), of 5G candidate waveforms, such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), filter bank multi-carrier (FBMC), and generalized frequency division multiplexing (GFDM), in the PDMA scheme. Regarding the detection of different users' data, the successive interference cancellation algorithm is performed at the receiver side. The simulation results, consolidated by the analytic study, exhibit that OFDM and FBMC could be used in the NOMA context, while the BER related to GFDM is very high.