Detection for 5G-NOMA: An online adaptive machine learning approach

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has emerged as a promising radio access technique for enabling the performance enhancements promised by the fifth-generation (5G) networks in terms of connectivity, latency, and spectrum efficiency. In the NOMA uplink, detection based on successive interference cancellation (SIC) with device clustering has been suggested. If the receivers are equipped with multiple antennas, SIC can be combined with minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) beamforming. However, there exists a tradeoff between the NOMA cluster size and the incurred SIC error. Larger clusters lead to larger errors but they are desirable from the spectrum efficiency and connectivity point of view. To enable the deployment of large clusters, we propose a novel online learning detection method for the NOMA uplink. We design an online adaptive filter in the sum space of linear and Gaussian reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs). Such a sum space design is robust against variations of a dynamic wireless network that can deteriorate the performance of a purely nonlinear adaptive filter. We demonstrate by simulations that the proposed method outperforms (symbol level) MMSE-SIC based detection for large cluster sizes.