Extending Low-Complexity Coded NOMA Systems: Power Optimization and Channel Performance on Rayleigh and Nakagami Fading

This paper evaluates the performance of a low-complexity receiver for Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) systems, eliminating the need to perform the Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) operation common in these systems. This research advances the state of the art in four main aspects: It presents a comparison between the Bit Error Rate (BER) performance of a system using a low-complexity decoder and a system with an SIC decoder; it uses a power allocation strategy to optimize BER performance, followed by a sensitivity analysis to evaluate the impact of small variations in power allocations; a detailed analysis of the low-complexity coding technique applied to Rayleigh and Nakagami channels; and the study of the impact of varying Nakagami fading parameters on BER performance for a low-complexity system. The results show that low-complexity decoding under consideration enables a 90% reduction in the memory needed to simulate the system.