The data traffic over the cellular network is projected to continue growing explosively in the coming years in view of the proliferation of smartphones and tablets and the advent of smart terminals and emerging applications, e.g. machine-type communications (MTC). As such, an increasingly large amount of research in academia, industry, and standardization bodies such as 3GPP is now dedicated to future 5G technologies.

Future radio access networks are expected to have the capability to support: 1) massive connectivity and dramatically higher capacity; 2) diverse sets of users and applications with radically different requirements in terms of delay, bandwidth, etc.; and 3) flexible and efficient use of all available resources, such as spectrum and time. The above requirements, especially the need for massive connectivity and diverging latency, challenge the current cellular networks in many ways including the multiple access (MA) methods. As a result, significant efforts have been recently made to design more spectrally and energy efficient MA schemes for future wireless networks. A common feature of these newly designed MA schemes is the avoidance of the use of conventional orthogonal schemes, such as time division multiple access (TDMA) and frequency division multiple access (FDMA). Instead, users are encouraged to share their bandwidth resources opportunistically according to their diverse channel conditions or quality of service requirements, where the superior spectral efficiency of these non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) schemes has been demonstrated by recent theoretical and experimental studies.

This workshop will provide a forum for brainstorming on the emerging NOMA techniques for 5G cellular networks. We aim to bring together the leading researchers in the field, both from academia and industry, to share their recent findings and their views on what access methods best suit the diverse requirements of next generation networks."