Deep Learning for an Effective Nonorthogonal Multiple Access Scheme

Nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been considered as an essential multiple access technique for enhancing system capacity and spectral efficiency in future communication scenarios. However, the existing NOMA systems have a fundamental limit: high computational complexity and a sharply changing wireless channel make exploiting the characteristics of the channel and deriving the ideal allocation methods very difficult tasks. To break this fundamental limit, in this paper, we propose a novel and effective deep learning (DL)-aided NOMA system, in which several NOMA users with random deployment are served by one base station. Since DL is advantageous in that it allows training the input signals and detecting sharply changing channel conditions, we exploit it to address wireless NOMA channels in an end-to-end manner. Specifically, it is employed in the proposed NOMA system to learn a completely unknown channel environment. A long short-term memory (LSTM) network based on DL is incorporated into a typical NOMA system, enabling the proposed scheme to detect the channel characteristics automatically. In the proposed strategy, the LSTM is first trained by simulated data under different channel conditions via offline learning, and then the corresponding output data can be obtained based on the current input data used during the online learning process. In general, we build, train and test the proposed cooperative framework to realize automatic encoding, decoding and channel detection in an additive white Gaussian noise channel. Furthermore, we regard one conventional user activity and data detection scheme as an unknown nonlinear mapping operation and use LSTM to approximate it to evaluate the data detection capacity of DL based on NOMA. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is robust and efficient compared with conventional approaches. In addition, the accuracy of the LSTM-aided NOMA scheme is studied by introducing the well-known tenfold cross-validation procedure.