A Study of Downlink Power-Domain Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access Performance in Tactile Internet Employing Sensors and Actuators

Abstract

The Tactile Internet (TI) characterises the transformative paradigm that aims to support real-time control and haptic communication between humans and machines, heavily relying on a dense network of sensors and actuators. Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) is a promising enabler of TI that enhances interactions between sensors and actuators, which are collectively considered as users, and thus supports multiple users simultaneously in sharing the same Resource Block (RB), consequently offering remarkable improvements in spectral efficiency and latency. This article proposes a novel downlink power domain Single-Input Single-Output (SISO) NOMA communication scenario for TI by considering multiple users and a base station. The Signal-to-Interference Noise Ratio (SINR), sum rate and fair Power Allocation (PA) coefficients are mathematically derived in the SISO-NOMA system model. The simulations are performed with two-user and three-user scenarios to evaluate the system performance in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER), sum rate and latency between SISO-NOMA and traditional Orthogonal Multiple Access (OMA) schemes. Moreover, outage probability is analysed with varying fixed Power Allocation (PA) coefficients in the SISO-NOMA scheme. In addition, we present the outage probability, sum rate and latency analyses for fixed and derived fair PA coefficients, thus promoting dynamic PA and user fairness by efficiently utilising the available spectrum. Finally, the performance of 4 × 4 Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) NOMA incorporating zero forcing-based beamforming and a round-robin scheduling process is compared and analysed with SISO-NOMA in terms of achievable sum rate and latency.