Energy efficiency (EE) and spectral efficiency (SE) are two of the key
performance metrics in future wireless networks, covering both design and
operational requirements. For previous conventional resource allocation
techniques, these two performance metrics have been considered in isolation,
resulting in severe performance degradation in either of these metrics.
Motivated by this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel beamforming design
that jointly considers the trade-off between the two performance metrics in a
multiple-input single-output non-orthogonal multiple access system. In
particular, we formulate a joint SE-EE based design as a multi-objective
optimization (MOO) problem to achieve a good tradeoff between the two
performance metrics. However, this MOO problem is not mathematically tractable
and, thus, it is difficult to determine a feasible solution due to the
conflicting objectives, where both need to be simultaneously optimized. To
overcome this issue, we exploit a priori articulation scheme combined with the
weighted sum approach. Using this, we reformulate the original MOO problem as a
conventional single objective optimization (SOO) problem. In doing so, we
develop an iterative algorithm to solve this non-convex SOO problem using the
sequential convex approximation technique. Simulation results are provided to
demonstrate the advantages and effectiveness of the proposed approach over the
available beamforming designs.Comment: Accepted in IEEE TWC, June 202