Practical MIMO-NOMA: Low Complexity & Capacity-Approaching Solution

Abstract: MIMO-NOMA combines Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) and Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA), which can address heterogeneous challenges, such as massive connectivity, low latency, and high reliability. In this paper, a practical coded MIMO-NOMA system with capacityapproaching performance as well as low implementation complexity is proposed. Specifically, the employed receiver consists of a multi-user Linear Minimum Mean-Square Error (LMMSE) detector and a bank of single-user message-passing decoders, which decompose the overall signal recovery into distributed low-complexity calculations. An asymptotic extrinsic information transfer analysis is proposed to estimate the performance of iterative receiver, where practical channel codes that match with the LMMSE detector in the iterative decoding perspective are constructed. As a result, the proposed coded MIMO-NOMA system achieves asymptotic performances within 0.2 dB from the theoretical capacity. Simulation results validate the reliability and robustness of the proposed system in practical settings, including various system loads, iteration numbers, code lengths, and channel conditions.