Joint Power Allocation and Hybrid Beamforming for Downlink mmWave-NOMA Systems

This paper investigates the application of nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in millimeter-Wave (mmWave) communications to address resource allocation issues for multiuser downlink transmission. Inspired by the K-means clustering algorithm, a NOMA user grouping policy is first employed in accordance with the channel correlation between users. The first-stage decoding order for each NOMA group is then determined by merely utilizing the users’ channel gain to formulate a joint power allocation and hybrid beamforming optimization problem. Specifically, we use signal-to-leakage-plus-noise ratio (SLNR) as the performance index of the optimization problem to reduce the computational complexity, because it can decouple the design of the beamforming and power allocation issues so they can be executed iteratively. Under given beamforming matrix, the power allocation issue is expressed as a quadratic programming (QP) problem, and then transformed into a convex problem by introducing an auxiliary-positive real variable to solve through the Lagrange multiplier method. On the contrary, the beamforming optimization problem is non-convex and very difficult to solve due to the constant modulus constraints in the hybrid architecture. However, the optimum solution of the ideal full-digital beamforming can be acquired primarily by generalized eigenvalue decomposition (GED). In this condition, two hybrid beamforming algorithms are proposed, in which normalized phase matching and equal gain transmission are performed respectively in the analog domain. On this basis, a second-stage decoding order can be employed according to the effective channel gain of users to perform successive interference cancellation (SIC) successfully. Numerical results show that the proposed joint power allocation and hybrid beamforming algorithms are superior to the classical mmWave-NOMA and orthogonal multiple access (OMA) schemes not only in lower implementation complexity, but also in better spectrum efficiency and energy efficiency performance.