A survey: Several technologies of non-orthogonal transmission for 5G

One key advantage of 4G OFDM system is the relatively simple receiver implementation due to the orthogonal resource allocation. However, from sum-capacity and spectral efficiency points of view, orthogonal systems are never the achieving schemes. With the rapid development of mobile communication systems, a novel concept of non-orthogonal transmission for 5G mobile communications has attracted researches all around the world. In this trend, many new multiple access schemes and waveform modulation technologies were proposed. In this paper, some promising ones of them were discussed which include Non-orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA), Sparse Code Multiple Access (SCMA), Multi-user Shared Access (MUSA), Pattern Division Multiple Access (PDMA) and some main new waveforms including Filter-bank based Multicarrier (FBMC), Universal Filtered Multi-Carrier (UFMC), Generalized Frequency Division Multiplexing (GFDM). By analyzing and comparing features of these technologies, a research direction of guiding on future 5G multiple access and waveform are given.