Error Performance Analysis of Multi-user Detection in Uplink-NOMA with Adaptive $\mathcal{M}$-QAM

This work provides a generalized performance analysis for the multi-user uplink-NOMA system with adaptive square quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) over Rayleigh fading channels. Motivated by the massive IoT connections and unavailability of orthogonal resources for each node, we consider a multi-access scheme where multi-users with single-antenna transmit data to a multiple-antenna base station through the same resource block. By taking advantage of combining diversity paths with the proposed joint maximum-likelihood detector (JMLD), a closed form expression for the upper bound of bit error rate (BER) is obtained. Despite the number of users or the order of modulation, the analytical results endorsed via computer simulations reveal the ability of the MRC-JMLD detector to discard the error floor completely. Moreover, the simulation results show that the MRC-JMLD surpasses its counterparts significantly and ensures a full diversity order.