  Among the new types of connectivity unleashed by the emerging 5G wireless
systems, Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC) is perhaps the most
innovative, yet challenging one. Ultra-reliability requires high levels of
diversity, however, the reactive approach based on packet retransmission in
HARQ protocols should be applied carefully to conform to the stringent latency
constraints. The main premise of this paper is that the NOMA principle can be
used to achieve highly efficient retransmissions by allowing concurrent use of
wireless resources in the uplink. We introduce a comprehensive solution that
accommodates multiple intermittently active users, each with its own HARQ
process. The performance is investigated under two different assumptions about
the Channel State Information (CSI) availability: statistical and
instantaneous. The results show that NOMA can indeed lead to highly efficient
system operation compared to the case in which all HARQ processes are run
orthogonally.
