Hybrid NOMA Assisted OFDMA Uplink Transmission

Hybrid non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has received considerable recent interest due to its ability to efficiently use resources from different domains and also its compatibility with various orthogonal multiple access (OMA) based legacy networks. Unlike existing studies of hybrid NOMA that focus on combining NOMA with time-division multiple access (TDMA), this work considers hybrid NOMA assisted orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) uplink transmission. In particular, the impact of a unique feature of hybrid NOMA assisted OFDMA, i.e., the availability of users’ dynamic channel state information, on the system performance is analyzed from the following two perspectives. From the optimization perspective, analytical results are developed which show that with hybrid NOMA assisted OFDMA, the pure OMA mode is rarely adopted by the users, and the pure NOMA mode could be optimal for minimizing the users’ energy consumption, which differs from the hybrid TDMA case. From the statistical perspective, two new performance metrics, namely the power outage probability and the power diversity gain, are developed to quantitatively measure the performance gain of hybrid NOMA over OMA. The developed analytical results also demonstrate the ability of hybrid NOMA to meet the users’ diverse energy profiles.