User Grouping, Precoding Design, and Power Allocation for MIMO-NOMA Systems

In this paper, we study user grouping, precoding design, and power allocation for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems. An optimization problem is formulated to the maximize the sum rate under a transmit power constraint at a base station and rate constraints on users, which are nonconvex and combinatorial and thus very challenging to solve. To tackle this problem, we carry out the optimization in two steps. In the first step, exploiting the machine learning technique, we develop an efficient iterative algorithm for user grouping and precoding design. In the second step, we develop a power-allocation scheme in closed form by recasting the original problem into a useful and tractable convex form. The numerical results demonstrate that the proposed joint scheme, including user grouping, precoding design, and power allocation, considerably outperforms the existing schemes in terms of sum rate maximization, which increases the sum-rate up to 8–18%. In addition, the results show the larger the number of antennas or users, the bigger the performance gap, at the cost of less computational complexity.