Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has a key feature that the cell-center user (CCU) has prior information about the messages of the cell-edge user (CEU) in the same user-pair. It means that CCU can be used for retransmission when the CEU requests retransmission. As ultra-reliability and low-latency communication (URLLC) requires high-reliability constraints (e.g., 99.999%), using CCU for retransmission can be useful to satisfy the reliability constraint. In this study, to ensure the reliability of CEU, cooperative retransmission (CR) scheme for downlink NOMA systems is proposed. And the CR scheme is evaluated with Block error rate (BLER) considering reliability and with packet loss rate (PLR) in terms of reliability and latency constraints. And the evaluation results showed that the proposed CR scheme can satisfy the target BLER for URLLC low SNR compared to the conventional retransmission scheme, and showed the improved PLR compared to the conventional retransmission scheme in low SNRs.
Keywords: cell-edge user (CEU); cooperative transmission; non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA); retransmission; ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC).