Mutual Successive Interference Cancellation Strategies in NOMA for Enhancing the Spectral Efficiency of CoMP Systems

The densification of mobile networks should enable the fifth generation (5G) mobile networks to cope with the ever increasing demand for higher rate traffic, reduced latency, and improved reliability. The large scale deployment of small cells and distributed antenna systems in heterogeneous environments will require more elaborate interference mitigating techniques to increase spectral efficiency and to help unlock the expected performance leaps from the new network topologies. Coordinated multi-point (CoMP) is the most advanced framework for interference management enabling the cooperation between base stations to mitigate inter-cell interference and boost cell-edge user performance. In this paper, we study the combination of CoMP with mutual SIC, an interference cancellation technique based on power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) that enables multiplexed users to simultaneously cancel their corresponding interfering signals. A highly efficient inter-cell interference cancellation scheme is then devised, that can encompass several deployment configurations and coordination techniques. The obtained results prove the superiority of this approach compared to conventional NOMA-CoMP systems.