Cooperative NOMA for Downlink Asymmetric Interference Cancellation

Abstract: This letter advances the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique for cellular downlink co-channel interference mitigation, via exploiting the (limited) cooperation among base stations (BSs). Specifically, we consider a simplified but practically relevant scenario of two co-channel cells with asymmetric interference, i.e., only the user in one cell receives the strong interference from the BS in the other cell. To mitigate such interference, we propose a new cooperative NOMA scheme, where the interfered user's serving BS sends a superposed signal comprising both the desired message and the co-channel user's message (shared by the interfering BS). The co-channel user's signal is aimed to add constructively with the interfering BS's signal at the interfered user's receiver so that the combined interference with enhanced power can be effectively decoded and cancelled. This thus leads to a new problem on how to optimally allocate the transmit power for the two superposed messages. We provide the closed-form solution to this problem and investigate the conditions under which the performance of the proposed scheme is superior over the existing schemes.