In this paper, a downlink single-cell non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) network with uniformly deployed users is considered and an analytical framework to evaluate its performance is developed. Particularly, the performance of NOMA is studied by assuming two types of partial channel state information (CSI). For the first one, which is based on imperfect CSI, we present a simple closed-form approximation for the outage probability and the average sum rate, as well as their high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) expressions. For the second type of CSI, which is based on second order statistics (SOS), we derive a closed-form expression for the outage probability and an approximate expression for the average sum rate for the special case two users. For the addressed scenario with the two types of partial CSI, the results demonstrate that NOMA can achieve superior performance compared to the traditional orthogonal multiple access (OMA). Moreover, SOS-based NOMA always achieves better performance than that with imperfect CSI, while it can achieve similar performance to the NOMA with perfect CSI at the low SNR region. The provided numerical results confirm that the derived expressions for the outage probability and the average sum rate match well with the Monte Carlo simulations.

On the Performance of Non-orthogonal Multiple Access Systems With Partial Channel Information