Unveiling the Importance of SIC in NOMA Systems: Part I -- State of the Art and Recent Findings

The key idea of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is to serve multiple users simultaneously at the same time and frequency, which can result in excessive multiple-access interference. As a crucial component of NOMA systems, successive interference cancelation (SIC) is key to combating this multiple-access interference, and is focused on in this letter, where an overview of SIC decoding order selection schemes is provided. In particular, selecting the SIC decoding order based on the users' channel state information (CSI) and the users' quality of service (QoS), respectively, is discussed. The limitations of these two approaches are illustrated, and then a recently proposed scheme, termed hybrid SIC, which dynamically adapts the SIC decoding order is presented and shown to achieve a surprising performance improvement that cannot be realized by the conventional SIC decoding order selection schemes individually.