NOMA-Assisted Grant-Free Transmission: How to Design Pre-Configured SNR Levels?

TL;DR

This paper explores how to design pre-configured SNR levels for NOMA-assisted grant-free transmission, analyzing their impact on network performance using age-of-information as a metric, and demonstrating NOMA's advantages over orthogonal access.

Contribution

It introduces different SNR level configuration strategies for NOMA grant-free transmission and evaluates their effects on performance, providing insights into optimal design choices.

Findings

NOMA outperforms orthogonal multiple access in grant-free transmission.

Different SNR configuration designs significantly affect network performance.

Analytical and simulation results validate the benefits of NOMA and the proposed SNR designs.

Abstract

An effective way to realize non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) assisted grant-free transmission is to first create multiple receive signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) levels and then serve multiple grant-free users by employing these SNR levels as bandwidth resources. These SNR levels need to be pre-configured prior to the grant-free transmission and have great impact on the performance of grant-free networks. The aim of this letter is to illustrate different designs for configuring the SNR levels and investigate their impact on the performance of grant-free transmission, where age-of-information is used as the performance metric. The presented analytical and simulation results demonstrate the performance gain achieved by NOMA over orthogonal multiple access, and also reveal the relative merits of the considered designs for pre-configured SNR levels.