Multiuser selection criteria for MIMO-NOMA systems with different detectors

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is an effective way to improve the spectrum efficiency of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, where this advancement can be fully exploited by employing a proper user selection strategy in the multiuser MIMO system. However, for multiuser scenarios, information-theoretic throughput may not be properly used as the performance indicator since the constraints at the receiver (e.g., suboptimal detectors) are not taken into consideration. In this paper, we adopt the error probability (EP) as the performance metric, which is equivalent to the practical throughput efficiency and can take the critical constraints into consideration. We analyze the pair-wise error probability (PEP) performance of different detectors and propose two kinds of user selection methods to minimize the PEP. To facilitate the detection performance evaluation, we further investigate the multiuser diversity of the proposed selection methods and derive a tight lower PEP bound for the case with randomly selected users. From the analytical and numerical results, we demonstrate that the proposed multiuser selection methods can suppress the inter-user interference effectively and achieve better performance than that of the state-of-the-art method.