What is the Benefit of Code-domain NOMA in Massive MIMO?

In overloaded Massive MIMO systems, wherein the number K of user equipments (UEs) exceeds the number of base station antennas M, it has recently been shown that non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) can increase performance. This paper aims at identifying cases of the classical operating regime K < M, where code-domain NOMA can also improve the spectral efficiency of Massive MIMO. Particular attention is given to use cases in which poor favorable propagation conditions are experienced. Numerical results show that Massive MIMO with planar antenna arrays can benefit from NOMA in practical scenarios where the UEs are spatially close to each other.Comment: To appear at the 2019 IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (IEEE PIMRC 2019), 5 pages, 5 figure

Secure transmission via joint precoding optimization for downlink MISO NOMA

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a prospective technology for radio resource constrained future mobile networks. However, NOMA users far from base station (BS) tend to be more susceptible to eavesdropping because they are allocated more transmit power. In this paper, we aim to jointly optimize the precoding vectors at BS to ensure the legitimate security in a downlink multiple-input single-output (MISO) NOMA network. When the eavesdropping channel state information (CSI) is available at BS, we can maximize the sum secrecy rate by joint precoding optimization. Owing to its non-convexity, the problem is converted into a convex one, which is solved by a second-order cone programming based iterative algorithm. When the CSI of the eavesdropping channel is not available, we first consider the case that the secure user is not the farthest from BS, and the transmit power of the farther users is maximized via joint precoding optimization to guarantee its security. Then, we consider the case when the farthest user from BS requires secure transmission, and the modified successive interference cancellation order and joint precoding optimization can be adopted to ensure its security. Similar method can be exploited to solve the two non-convex problems when the CSI is unknown. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed schemes can improve the security performance for MISO NOMA systems effectively, with and without eavesdropping CSI

On the Performance Gain of NOMA over OMA in Uplink Communication Systems

In this paper, we investigate and reveal the ergodic sum-rate gain (ESG) of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) over orthogonal multiple access (OMA) in uplink cellular communication systems. A base station equipped with a single-antenna, with multiple antennas, and with massive antenna arrays is considered both in single-cell and multi-cell deployments. In particular, in single-antenna systems, we identify two types of gains brought about by NOMA: 1) a large-scale near-far gain arising from the distance discrepancy between the base station and users; 2) a small-scale fading gain originating from the multipath channel fading. Furthermore, we reveal that the large-scale near-far gain increases with the normalized cell size, while the small-scale fading gain is a constant, given by $\gamma$ = 0.57721 nat/s/Hz, in Rayleigh fading channels. When extending single-antenna NOMA to $M$-antenna NOMA, we prove that both the large-scale near-far gain and small-scale fading gain achieved by single-antenna NOMA can be increased by a factor of $M$ for a large number of users. Moreover, given a massive antenna array at the base station and considering a fixed ratio between the number of antennas, $M$, and the number of users, $K$, the ESG of NOMA over OMA increases linearly with both $M$ and $K$. We then further extend the analysis to a multi-cell scenario. Compared to the single-cell case, the ESG in multi-cell systems degrades as NOMA faces more severe inter-cell interference due to the non-orthogonal transmissions. Besides, we unveil that a large cell size is always beneficial to the ergodic sum-rate performance of NOMA in both single-cell and multi-cell systems. Numerical results verify the accuracy of the analytical results derived and confirm the insights revealed about the ESG of NOMA over OMA in different scenarios.Comment: 51 pages, 7 figures, invited paper, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Communication

Enhanced User Grouping and Power Allocation for Hybrid mmWave MIMO-NOMA Systems

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and millimeter wave (mmWave) are two key enabling technologies for the fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks and beyond. In this paper, we consider uplink communications with a hybrid beamforming structure and focus on improving the spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE) of mmWave multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)-NOMA systems with enhanced user grouping and power allocation. It is noted that the optimization of the SE/EE is a challenging task due to the non-linear programming nature of the corresponding problem involving user grouping, beam selection, and power allocation. Our idea is to decompose the overall optimization problem into a mixed integer problem comprised of user grouping and beam selection only, followed by a continuous problem involving power allocation and digital beamforming design. Exploiting the directionality property of mmWave channels, we first propose a novel initial agglomerative nesting (AGNES) based user grouping algorithm by taking advantage of the channel correlations. To avoid the prohibitively high complexity of the brute-force search approach and to address the overlapping beam problem, we propose two suboptimal low-complexity user grouping and beam selection schemes, the two-stage direct AGNES (D-AGNES) scheme and the joint successive AGNES (S-AGNES) scheme. We also introduce the quadratic transform (QT) to recast the non-convex power allocation optimization problem into a convex one subject to a minimum required data rate of each user. The continuous problem is solved by iteratively optimizing the power and the digital beamforming. Extensive simulation results have shown that our proposed mmWave-NOMA design outperforms the conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA) scenario and the state-of-art NOMA schemes