Is the Envelope Beneficial to Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access?

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is capable of serving different numbers of users in the same time-frequency resource element, and this feature can be leveraged to carry additional information. In the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system, a novel enhanced NOMA scheme called NOMA with informative envelope (NOMA-IE) is proposed to explore extra flexibility from the envelope of NOMA signals. In this scheme, data bits are conveyed by the quantified signal envelope in addition to classic signal constellations. The subcarrier activation patterns of different users are jointly decided by the envelope former at the transmitter of NOMA-IE. At the receiver, successive interference cancellation (SIC) is employed, and the envelope detection coefficient is introduced to eliminate the error floor. Theoretical expressions of spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, and detection complexity are provided first. Then, considering the binary phase shift keying modulation, the block error rate and bit error rate are derived based on the two-subcarrier element. The analytical results reveal that the SIC error and the index error are the main factors degrading the error performance. The numerical results demonstrate the superiority of the NOMA-IE over the OFDM and OFDM-NOMA in terms of the error rate performance when all the schemes have the same spectral efficiency and energy efficiency.