On the Design of Massive Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access With Imperfect Successive Interference Cancellation

In this paper, we address a practical but adverse problem that successive interference cancellation (SIC) is imperfect in a massive non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system. The benefits of a multiple-antenna base station are exploited to support massive access through user clustering in the spatial domain and alleviate the impact of imperfect SIC. In particular, transmit beams and powers are jointly optimized to mitigate the intra-cluster and inter-cluster interference, so as to improve the overall performance in the presence of imperfect SIC. Specifically, we design the joint optimization algorithms from the perspectives of maximizing the weighted sum rate and minimizing the total power consumption, respectively. Moreover, in order to reduce the computational complexity, we design the massive NOMA algorithms with zero-forcing beamforming fixedly. The impacts of imperfect SIC on the design of massive NOMA algorithms are revealed, and it is found that the proposed algorithms are still applicable even if SIC is perfect. Finally, simulations results validate the theoretical claims and show that obvious performance gain can be obtained over the baseline algorithms.