Performance Comparison of Multi-User Shared Multiple Access Scheme in Uplink Channels

In fifth-generation mobile communications systems (5G), grant-free non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) schemes have been considered as a way to accommodate the many wireless connections required for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In NOMA schemes, both system capacity enhancement and transmission protocol simplification are achieved, and an overload test of more than one hundred percent of the transmission samples over conducted. Multi-user shared multiple access (MUSA) has been proposed as a representative scheme for NOMA. However, the performance of MUSA has not been fully analyzed nor compared to other NOMA or orthogonal multiple access schemes. Therefore, in this study, we theoretically and numerically analyze the performance of MUSA in uplink fading environments and compare it with orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA), space division multiple access-based OFDMA, low-density signature, and sparse code multiple access. The characteristics and superiority of MUSA are then clarified.