Uplink Power-Domain Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA): Bit Error Rate Performance With Channel Estimation Errors

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been proposed as a promising multiple access (MA) technique in order to meet the requirements for fifth generation (5G) communications and to enhance the performance in internet of things (IoT) networks by enabling massive connectivity, high throughput, and low latency. This paper investigates the bit error rate (BER) performance of two-user uplink power-domain NOMA with a successive interference cancellation (SIC) receiver and taking into account channel estimation errors. The analysis considers two scenarios: perfect (ideal) channel estimation and a channel with estimation errors for various modulations schemes, BPSK, QPSK, and 16-QAM. The simulation results show that, as expected, increasing of the modulation level increases the SIC receiver BER. For example, at a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 5 dB for perfect channel estimation and QPSK modulation, the user that is detected first has a BER of 0.005 compared to 0.14 for the user that is detected with the aid of the SIC receiver. Similarly, the BER of QPSK, assuming 0.25 channel estimation error of user 1, is equal to 0.06 at SNR = 15 dB compared to 0.017 for perfect estimation.