Improving the Aggregate Utility of IEEE 802.11 WLAN Using NOMA

The IEEE 802.11 WLAN standards are very popular since three decades due to its flexibility and operation in unlicensed frequency bands. It provides physical and MAC layer specifications. We present an analytical model with a channel access scheme to improve the aggregate utility of WLAN using non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). The NOMA is used at physical layer and in MAC layer distributed coordination function (DCF) is considered. With the inclusion of NOMA in WLAN, multiple transmissions are possible in a resource block. Moreover, it mitigates the contention process to enhance the performance of WLAN. With the analytical model, we show the performance of NOMA based WLAN improved compared to conventional WLAN. The analytical results are validated with simulations.