  This work introduces downlink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) into
short-packet communications. NOMA has great potential to improve fairness and
spectral efficiency with respect to orthogonal multiple access (OMA) for
low-latency downlink transmission, thus making it attractive for the emerging
Internet of Things. We consider a two-user downlink NOMA system with finite
blocklength constraints, in which the transmission rates and power allocation
are optimized. To this end, we investigate the trade-off among the transmission
rate, decoding error probability, and the transmission latency measured in
blocklength. Then, a one-dimensional search algorithm is proposed to resolve
the challenges mainly due to the achievable rate affected by the finite
blocklength and the unguaranteed successive interference cancellation. We also
analyze the performance of OMA as a benchmark to fully demonstrate the benefit
of NOMA. Our simulation results show that NOMA significantly outperforms OMA in
terms of achieving a higher effective throughput subject to the same finite
blocklength constraint, or incurring a lower latency to achieve the same
effective throughput target. Interestingly, we further find that with the
finite blocklength, the advantage of NOMA relative to OMA is more prominent
when the effective throughput targets at the two users become more comparable.
