A comprehensive survey of existing researches on NOMA-based integrated satellite-terrestrial networks for 5G

Abstract

The fifth generation of mobile communication networks (5G) is expected to provide both massive and global coverage simultaneously, allowing users to remain reachable from anywhere around the planet. To achieve this, the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technology and the integrated satellite–terrestrial networks (ISTNs) are considered as key components due to their ability to provide massive capacity and ubiquity of the system. While there are various ongoing researches on 5G network development based on NOMA and ISTNs independently or collectively, no paper thus far has, however, reported a comprehensive survey of existing researches that apply NOMA to ISTNs for 5G applications. This paper therefore presents a comprehensive survey NOMA-based ISTNs development studies. More precisely, it presents papers that have investigated performances of NOMA-based ISTNs as well as those that have designed algorithms for power allocation and precoding for NOMA-based ISTNs. A few observations are made from the produced survey and have been used to produce a list of interesting topics opened for future research in this field.