High Efficiency Wireless-NOMA Solutions for Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0 is expected to change radically the current ecosystem of industrial technologies, including commu-nication systems. Novel industrial scenarios will request to fulfill tight requirements, such as low latency and ultra-high reliability. Classical wired solutions lack scalability and mobility and assume high deployment costs. However, in wireless communications, the propagation channel appears as an additional challenge to overcome the limitations of wired systems. This paper addresses several requirements simultaneously using Non-Orthogonal Mul-tiple Access (NOMA). An efficient superframe structure has been designed to deliver additional services (i.e., high-quality video service) and transmit specific services (i.e., critical services). Furthermore, the performance of the additional service (i.e., best effort) has been tested in terms of availability and capacity. Then, another Key Performance Indicator (KPI) deeply analyzed in this paper is energy consumption. Finally, the entire communication system has been evaluated from different perspectives, and some guidelines have been provided to detail the best configurations depending on the optimization KPI.