We mathematically derive an upper bound of bit- error rate (BER) of $uplink$ non-orthogonal multiple access sys- tems with quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) modulation in fading channels. In particular, we exploit the $joint\, maximum-likelihood$ (ML) detector at a base station (BS) with multiple antennas since it results in the $optimal$ BER performance of a super-imposed QPSK modulated symbols from multiple mobile stations (MSs). In particular, we obtain a closed-form integral of Q-function with Erlang distributed random variable to derive the BER. We also obtain diversity order of the uplink NOMA systems. Through extensive computer simulations, we validate that our analytical results match well with the simulation results especially in high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime.

We investigate the uplink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks, where each IoT device (station: STA) equipped with a single antenna exploits the constellation-rotated space-time line code (CR-STLC) to send signals to an access point (AP) equipped with two receive antennas. The AP decodes the signals transmitted from the STAs with the optimal joint maximum-likelihood (JML) detector. As a main result, we mathematically analyze both the bit-error-rate (BER) performance and the spatial diversity order of each STA in the two-user uplink CR-STLC NOMA system. In particular, it is shown that the two-user uplink CR-STLC NOMA system achieves the optimal diversity order regardless of the constellation rotation angle in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. We also consider two different rotation angle optimization techniques (dynamic rotation & fixed rotation) to improve the BER performance in the practical SNR regime, and found that the fixed rotation approach is simple but yields almost the same performance as the dynamic approach. Finally, we show that the uplink CR-STLC NOMA system achieves the spatial diversity order of 1 even when more than two STAs send packets simultaneously. It is worth noting that all STAs obtain an improved spatial diversity gain compared to that without constellation rotation.

We propose a spectrally efficient uplink cooperative relaying protocol with $K$ multiple half-duplex relay stations (RNs) for wireless Internet of Things (IoT) networks, where two IoT devices (IDs) and an access point (AP) cannot directly communicate with each other. The two IDs simultaneously transmit signals over the same spectrum resource using the nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique. In the proposed technique, at a certain time slot, a single RN is selected to send the received packets from two IDs in the previous time slot, while the remaining $K-1$ RNs receive new packets from two IDs. Thus, the proposed relaying protocol can send $N$ packets from an ID to the AP during $N+1$ time slots without a duty-cycle loss in conventional half-duplex relaying schemes. We call the proposed protocol a spectrally efficient cooperative NOMA. The main highlight of our results is that we mathematically derive a closed-form outage probability of the proposed protocol by considering inter-relay interference, assuming an optimal joint decoding technique instead of successive interference cancelation (SIC) decoding at each RN. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first theoretical result in the literature. Extensive computer simulations are used to validate the mathematical results. Furthermore, it is shown that the proposed protocol significantly outperforms the existing two-hop half-duplex cooperative NOMA technique and the SIC decoding scheme in terms of outage probability.

In this letter, we mathematically analyze the bit-error rate (BER) performance of a generalized uplink index-modulated non-orthogonal multiple access (IM-NOMA) system consisting of a base station (BS) with multiple antennas and an arbitrary number of devices with different modulation schemes. We focus on the case that a single subcarrier is activated among S(≥2) subcarriers according to index bits to reduce computational complexity. The optimal joint maximum-likelihood (JML) algorithm is assumed to be used for detecting a super-imposed symbol from multiple devices. The closed-form BER is shown to be matched well with simulation results. We also investigate the effect of channel estimation error on the BER. To the best of our knowledge, the mathematical characterization of BER of the generalized uplink IM-NOMA system with an arbitrary number of uplink devices with different modulation schemes and multiple receive antennas at the BS does not exist in the literature. Finally, we show that our analytical framework can be applied to analyze a cell-free massive MIMO NOMA system, which is expected to be one of the most promising techniques for 6G wireless communication systems.

In this paper, we propose a novel low-complexity multi-user superposition transmission (MUST) technique for 5G downlink networks, which allows multiple cell-edge users to be multiplexed with a single cell-center user. We call the proposed technique diversity-controlled MUST technique since the cell-center user enjoys the frequency diversity effect via signal repetition over multiple orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) sub-carriers. We assume that a base station is equipped with a single antenna but users are equipped with multiple antennas. In addition, we assume that the quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) modulation is used for users. We mathematically analyze the bit error rate (BER) of both cell-edge users and cell-center users, which is the first theoretical result in the literature to the best of our knowledge. The mathematical analysis is validated through extensive link-level simulations.