Power Allocation for Reliable SIC Detection of Rectangular QAM-based NOMA Systems

This paper considers the power allocation for non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) users to enable using the successive interference cancellation (SIC) while providing reliable error performance. The derived closed-form expressions are applicable for arbitrary number of NOMA users each of which has a square or rectangular quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) constellation with arbitrary order. The obtained numerical results show that power assignment process at the transmitter for the superposition process and at the receiver for the SIC process should be performed meticulously because the power difference between the weakest and strongest users can be tremendous when the number of users or the modulation orders increase. Moreover, the derived expressions can be used to reduce the computational complexity that is required to obtain the optimal power coefficients using brute force methods by significantly reducing the search space.