Low-complexity selective mapping technique for PAPR reduction in downlink power domain OFDM-NOMA

To support ultra-massive connectivity, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) techniques are expected to be used in 6G instead of conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA) techniques. Furthermore, given that orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) was used by 4G and 5G, NOMA is expected to be combined with OFDM to mitigate frequency selectivity in multipath channels. However, after passing through nonlinear high power amplifiers (HPAs), OFDM-NOMA has reportedly suffered from nonlinear distortion due to the high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) problem, thus reducing users’ achievable data rates, sum rate capacity, and users’ bit error rate after going through nonlinear HPAs. Many PAPR reduction techniques have been introduced in the literature; however, high PAPR reduction gain comes at the expense of computational complexity. In this paper, a novel selective mapping (SLM) scheme for PAPR reduction in OFDM-NOMA systems is proposed. By utilizing the structure of the OFDM-NOMA transmitter, the proposed SLM scheme achieves the same performance as that of the conventional SLM scheme while requiring less computational complexity.