An Overview of Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access

In recent years, non-orthogonal multiple access(NOMA) has attracted a lot of attention as a novel and promising power-domain us-er multiplexing scheme for Long-Term Evolution(LTE) enhancement and 5G. NOMA is able to contribute to the improvement ofthe tradeoff between system capacity and user fairness(i.e., cell-edge user experience). This improvement becomes in particularemphasized in a cellular system where the channel conditions vary significantly among users due to the near-far effect. In this arti-cle, we provide an overview of the concept, design and performance of NOMA. In addition, we review the potential benefits and is-sues of NOMA over orthogonal multiple access(OMA) such as orthogonal frequency division multiple access(OFDMA) adoptedby LTE, and the status of 3GPP standardization related to NOMA.