Meta Distribution of Partial-NOMA

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the meta distribution in a two-user partial NOMA network, revealing how sharing only a fraction of resources affects link performance and fairness, with implications for network design.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of the meta distribution in pNOMA, deriving reduced integral expressions and approximations for moments, enhancing understanding of performance and fairness trade-offs.

Findings

pNOMA outperforms NOMA only when resource sharing fraction is small

pNOMA enhances fairness by improving weak-user performance more than strong-user

Accurate moment approximations facilitate performance analysis

Abstract

This work studies the meta distribution (MD) in a two-user partial non-orthogonal multiple access (pNOMA) network. Compared to NOMA where users fully share a resource-element, pNOMA allows sharing only a fraction $\alpha$ of the resource-element. The MD is computed via moment-matching using the first two moments where reduced integral expressions are derived. Accurate approximates are also proposed for the $b{\rm th}$ moment for mathematical tractability. We show that in terms of percentile-performance of links, pNOMA only outperforms NOMA when $\alpha$ is small. Additionally, pNOMA improves the percentile-performance of the weak-user more than the strong-user highlighting its role in improving fairness.