Pattern Division Multiple Access—A Novel Nonorthogonal Multiple Access for Fifth-Generation Radio Networks

In this paper, pattern division multiple access (PDMA), which is a novel nonorthogonal multiple access scheme, is proposed for fifth-generation (5G) radio networks. The PDMA pattern defines the mapping of transmitted data to a resource group that can consist of time, frequency, and spatial resources or any combination of these resources. The pattern is introduced to differentiate signals of users sharing the same resources, and the pattern is designed with disparate diversity order and sparsity so that PDMA can take the advantage of the joint design of transmitter and receiver to improve system performance while maintaining detection complexity to a reasonable level. System level simulation results show that PDMA can support six times simultaneous connections than that of conventional and at least 30% improvement in spectrum efficiency over orthogonal frequency division multiple access.