Network Slicing for eMBB and mMTC with NOMA and Space Diversity Reception

In this work, we study the coexistence in the same Radio Access Network (RAN) of two use cases present in the Fifth Generation (5G) of wireless communication systems: enhanced Mobile BroadBand (eMBB) and massive Machine-Type Communications (mMTC). eMBB services are requested for applications that demand extremely high data rates and moderate requirements on latency and reliability, whereas mMTC enables applications for connecting a massive number of low-power and low-complexity devices. The coexistence of both services is enabled by means of network slicing and Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) with Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) decoding. Under the orthogonal slicing, the radio resources are exclusively allocated to each service, while in the non-orthogonal slicing the traffics from both services overlap in the same radio resources. We evaluate the uplink performance of both services in a scenario with a multi-antenna Base Station (BS). Our simulation results show that the performance gains obtained through multiple receive antennas are more accentuated for the non-orthogonal slicing than for the orthogonal allocation of resources, such that the non-orthogonal slicing outperforms its orthogonal counterpart in terms of achievable data rates or number of connected devices as the number of receive antennas increases.