A New Non-Orthogonal Transceiver for Asynchronous Grant-Free Transmission Systems

The grant-free non-orthogonal multiple access (GF-NOMA) system, in which users autonomously transmit uplink data signals without carrying out a complicated random access process, offers significant advantages for increasing the efficiency of resource usage with low signaling overhead. In the proposed GF-NOMA system, since the collision resolution process is omitted and resources are not pre-assigned to users, multiple users may use same resource, without the base station (BS) being able to identify these collided users. In addition, in the absence of the UL synchronization procedure generally performed in the random access process, multiple users' signals are received asynchronously. To solve these problems, we have developed a new transceiver structure for the GF-NOMA system consisting of a secondary preamble and a multiuser-multisymbol (MUMS) detector. The purpose of the secondary preamble is to successfully detect user access and estimate channel information even when no collision resolution process is being performed. The MUMS receiver is then proposed as a way to effectively mitigate the severe interference caused by the asynchronous transmission. Simulation results show that the proposed preamble structure and the receiver structure are superior to the conventional schemes. Furthermore, we show that the GF-NOMA system with the proposed transceiver structure achieves much better performance than other GF-NOMA systems in terms of reliability and successfully detected bits.