Comparison Study between NOMA and SCMA

Abstract

In this paper, the performance and system complexity of the candidate multiple access (MA) techniques for the next generation of cellular systems, namely, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) (in this paper, we consider power domain MA as NOMA) and sparse code multiple access (SCMA), are investigated. To this end, for each MA technique, a resource allocation problem considering heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNet) is formulated. We apply successive convex approximation (SCA) method to each problem and obtain their solutions. The simulation results show that SCMA-based system achieves better performance than NOMA-based one at the cost of more complexity.