Performance Evaluation of Uplink OFDMA-IDMA for Next Generation Wi-Fi

The 802.11ax standard introduced Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) as an approach for uplink multiple access. However, it comes with drawbacks related to user scalability and bandwidth utilization. This paper proposes a novel approach to uplink multiple access, integrating the Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) technique with OFDMA, particularly employing Interleave Division Multiple Access (IDMA) to overcome these drawbacks. The paper conducts a comprehensive evaluation of the performance of OFDMA-IDMA. The findings demonstrate that this technique is not only competitive fully with existing standards but also enhances sum rate by nearly 1.9 times. Furthermore, the results suggest that this approach remains viable for forthcoming Wi-Fi standards, especially as the number of uplink transmissions escalates, while still preserving overall system quality.