Unveiling the Importance of SIC in NOMA Systems—Part II: New Results and Future Directions

In most existing works on non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), the decoding order of successive interference cancellation (SIC) is prefixed and based on either the users' channel conditions or their quality of service (QoS) requirements. A recent work on NOMA assisted semi-grant-free transmission showed that the use of a more sophisticated hybrid SIC scheme can yield significant performance improvements. This letter illustrates how the concept of hybrid SIC can be generalized and applied to different NOMA applications. We first use NOMA assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) as an example to illustrate the benefits of hybrid SIC, where new results for offloading energy minimization are presented. Then, future directions for generalizing hybrid SIC with adaptive decoding order selection as well as its promising applications are discussed.