Advanced NOMA Receivers From a Unified Variational Inference Perspective

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) on shared resources has been identified as a promising technology in 5G to improve resource efficiency and support massive access in all kinds of transmission modes. Power domain and code domain NOMA have been extensively studied and evaluated in both literatures and 3GPP standardization, especially for the uplink where large number of users would like to send their messages to the base station. Though different in the transmitter side design, power domain NOMA and code domain NOMA share the same need of the advanced multi-user detection (MUD) design at the receiver side. Various multi-user detection algorithms have been proposed, balancing performance and complexity in different ways, which is important for the implementation of NOMA in practical networks. In this paper, we introduce a unified variational inference (VI) perspective on various universal NOMA MUD algorithms such as belief propagation (BP), expectation propagation (EP), vector EP (VEP), approximate message passing (AMP) and vector AMP (VAMP), demonstrating how they could be derived from and adapted to each other within the VI framework. Moreover, we unveil and prove that conventional elementary signal estimator (ESE) and linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) receivers are special cases of EP and VEP, respectively, thus bridging the gap between classic linear receivers and message passing based nonlinear receivers. Such a unified perspective would not only help the design and adaptation of NOMA receivers, but also open a door for the systematic design of joint active user detection and multi-user decoding for sporadic grant-free transmission.

Automated summary

NOMA on shared resources is a promising technology in 5G for improving resource efficiency and supporting massive access in various transmission modes. Different algorithms for multi-user detection have been proposed to balance performance and complexity, with a unified perspective on various NOMA MUD algorithms provided in this paper. This unified perspective not only helps in designing and adapting NOMA receivers, but also enables systematic design of joint active user detection and multi-user decoding for sporadic grant-free transmission.