An Error-limited NOMA-HARQ Approach using Short Packets

In this paper, we propose and analyze an error-constrained data transmission approach for uplink communication using non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). The results are presented for the cases with hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) protocols where, depending on the message decoding status in the previous rounds, the decoding scheme of the receiver as well as the data rates/transmission powers of the transmitters are adapted correspondingly. We perform finite block-length analysis of the proposed scheme and study the effect of the codewords length on the performance of NOMA-HARQ protocols. Particularly, considering repetition time diversity HARQ and codewords of finite length, we determine the expected error-limited achievable rate and the transmit power improvement of our proposed scheme, compared to the conventional NOMA-HARQ protocols. As we show, smart adaptation of the decoding scheme improves the spectral/energy efficiency of NOMA-HARQ protocols considerably with no additional receiver complexity.