On the Performance Gain of NOMA Over OMA in Uplink Communication Systems

In this paper, we investigate and reveal the ergodic sum-rate gain (ESG) of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) over orthogonal multiple access (OMA) in uplink cellular communication systems. A base station equipped with a single-antenna, with multiple antennas, and with massive antenna arrays is considered both in single-cell and multi-cell deployments. In particular, in single-antenna systems, we identify two types of gains brought about by NOMA: 1) a large-scale near-far gain arising from the distance discrepancy between the base station and users; 2) a small-scale fading gain originating from the multipath channel fading. Furthermore, we reveal that the large-scale near-far gain increases with the normalized cell size, while the small-scale fading gain is a constant, given by $\gamma = 0.57721$ nat/s/Hz, in Rayleigh fading channels. When extending single-antenna NOMA to M-antenna NOMA, we prove that both the large-scale near-far gain and small-scale fading gain achieved by single-antenna NOMA can be increased by a factor of M for a large number of users. Moreover, given a massive antenna array at the base station and considering a fixed ratio between the number of antennas, M, and the number of users, K, the ESG of NOMA over OMA increases linearly with both M and K. We then further extend the analysis to a multi-cell scenario. Compared to the single-cell case, the ESG in multi-cell systems degrades as NOMA faces more severe inter-cell interference due to the non-orthogonal transmissions. Besides, we unveil that a large cell size is always beneficial to the ergodic sum-rate performance of NOMA in both single-cell and multi-cell systems. Numerical results verify the accuracy of the analytical results derived and confirm the insights revealed about the ESG of NOMA over OMA in different scenarios.