CIF:Small:Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access with Imperfect Assumptions

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

There has been a tremendous emergence of new applications of wireless communications in different aspects of life. These new applications and the corresponding opportunities have improved the quality of life, provided economical growth, and helped the expansion of new businesses. The next generation of wireless, dubbed 5G, promises unmet demands for higher transmission data rates through designing more efficient wireless communication networks. To increase the efficiency of the emerging wireless networks, the concurrent transmission of different users, as pursued in this project, is unavoidable. The outcomes of this year-long project can help inform future generations of wireless communications standards and spur a new direction of research that can greatly increase the efficiency of radio spectrum used for wireless communications. Recently, Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) has been suggested as an efficient method to enable the concurrent transmission of multiple users in the same frequency/time resource block. It provides many nice properties including high bandwidth efficiency, fairness among different users, and ultra-high connectivity. While the above properties can be very advantageous, they are obtained under perfect assumptions, such as the availability of perfect synchronization. For the multiuser/multi-cell environments for which NOMA is an essential technology, these assumptions are more likely to be violated. In this exploratory project, the investigator studies the effects of imperfect timing synchronization in multi-user NOMA systems and design high performance NOMA systems. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.