Delay-Sensitive NOMA-HARQ for Short Packet Communications

This paper investigates the two-user uplink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) paired with the hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) in the finite blocklength regime, where the target latency of each user is the priority. To limit the packet delivery delay and avoid packet queuing of the users, we propose a novel NOMA-HARQ approach where the retransmission of each packet is served non-orthogonally with the new packet in the same time slot. We use a Markov model (MM) to analyze the dynamics of the uplink NOMA-HARQ with one retransmission and characterize the packet error rate (PER), throughput, and latency performance of each user. We also present numerical optimizations to find the optimal power ratios of each user. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms the standard NOMA-HARQ in terms of packet delivery delay at the target PER.