Faster-than-Nyquist Asynchronous NOMA Outperforms Synchronous NOMA

Faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) signaling aided non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is conceived and its achievable rate is quantified in the presence of \emph{random} link delays of the different users. We reveal that exploiting the link delays may potentially lead to a signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) gain, while transmitting the data symbols at FTN rates has the potential of increasing the degree-of-freedom (DoF). We then unveil the fundamental trade-off between the SINR and DoF. In particular, at a sufficiently high symbol rate, the SINR gain vanishes while the DoF gain achieves its maximum, where the achievable rate is almost $(1+\beta)$ times higher than that of the conventional synchronous NOMA transmission in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, with $\beta$ being the roll-off factor of the signaling pulse. Our simulation results verify our analysis and demonstrate considerable rate improvements over the conventional power-domain NOMA scheme.