Low overhead NOMA receiver with automatic modulation classification techniques

Recently non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique has been proposed for boosting spectral efficiencies in 5G cellular networks. In NOMA the transmitter maps a predefined number of user symbols on to the same resources. The conventional receiver for NOMA is the well-known serial interference cancellation. To overcome the problem of high overhead signalling, a receiver with an automatic modulation classification (AMC) algorithm for a K-user NOMA which identifies the modulation scheme of users before symbol detection is proposed. First, a two-user NOMA (TU-NOMA) scheme is treated and the receiver is extended to more general cases. For evaluating the performance of the proposed receiver its bit error rate (BER) for TU-NOMA case has been driven and shown that this can be approximated as the sum of the demodulator BER and the AMC algorithm error probability. The simulation results show the BER degradation can be neglected if an enough number of symbols with sufficiently large SNR values are available.