Compute-and-Forward for Uplink Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access

Successive interference cancellation (SIC) has been regarded as the de facto decoding method in the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system. However, SIC often requires the paired users to have significantly different received power levels for the uplink scenario. This is problematic in terms of fairness and outage probabilities when the paired users are close to each other. To address this challenge, we propose a new decoding method for uplink NOMA based on compute-and-forward. In particular, we show that our method achieves better fairness and smaller average outage probabilities while enjoying essentially the same complexity as SIC decoding.