NON-ORTHOGONAL MULTIPLE ACCESS (NOMA) FOR BEYOND 5G (B5G) SATELLITE SYSTEMS (ARTES 4.0 SPL 5G/6G 3F.060) - EXPRO+ - RE-ISSUE

Objective: The objective is to develop, implement and test Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) on the uplink of a Beyond 5G (B5G)satellite system. The link shall be representative of3GPP-compliant Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) scenarios .TargetedImprovements:Improving resources utilisation in dense and / or heterogenous system environments, allowing 50% spectral efficiency increase withrespect to orthogonal multiple access.Description: Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) is recognized as a key technology for beyond 5G networks, aiming to enhance the system capacity and tackle the challenges ofmassive connectivity by improving spectrum efficiency. NOMA was studied in 3GPP release 15 for New Radio (NR) in TN context but it was not pursued. Instead, it wasclassified as a technology for next generation. However, only Code-Domain NOMA was analysed in release 15. Since then, both academia and major industry players havebeen working on enhancing NOMA, including both Code-Domain (CD-NOMA) and Power-Domain (PD-NOMA) variants and they have yielded promising results including NTNscenarios up to 80% throughput gain. Among the challenges that these efforts have targeted are implementation complexity and interference management.This activity will develop and test over-the-air an efficient and low complexity NOMA techniques for satellite uplink using 3GPP NR NTN air interface. The developments concernboth the strategy for poweror code allocation and user pairing, as well as the efficient implementation of successive interference cancellation at the receiver. User pairing andpower allocation shall consider both a distributed grant-free AI-based strategy such as a distributed leaning methodology with an agent at each user, and a static strategy basedon the network architecture. The implementation of Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) at the receiver side shall consider the receiver processing chain based on 3GPPair interface. The selected NOMA solution shall be compared to a benchmark orthogonal multiple access scheme in the specified scenarios and use cases considering as aminimum the system throughput, latency and complexity. Furthermore, the outcome of the activity shall serve as a benchmark for beyond 5G standardization. The integration ofNOMA in beyond 5G shall be seen either as stand-alone access scheme (for massiveconnectivity scenarios for example), or opportunistic on top of orthogonal access when thelatter is not able to serve all users (sudden user population peaks or specific heterogenous systems).