RAN Resource Slicing and Sharing with NOMA for Latency Reduction in Uplink URLLC Networks

A major feature of 5G, ultra reliable low latency communication (URLLC) network aims to enable mission critical services with stringent latency constraints. On the other hand, non-orthogonal multiple access scheme (NOMA), a prime candidate for 5G multiple access scheme, utilizes the received power differences to allow several users to share the same resource blocks (RBs), increasing the throughput, while negatively affecting successive interference cancellation (SIC) decoding latency of certain users. Therefore, this paper proposes two different NOMA- based user clustering techniques for uplink transmissions aiming to reduce latency for time stringent services. Users are clustered and RBs are assigned among the users in a way to achieve the target latency constraints of users. Changes in latency and throughputs are thoroughly investigated for the validation of the proposed techniques.