User pairing impact on the performance of hybrid beamforming NOMA system

Abstract

This paper proposes a new user pairing technique for a power domain nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) deploying fully connected and subconnected hybrid beamforming (HBF) structures for a typical urban microcell downlink of line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) surroundings. NOMA system’s configurations are set up for two (multiple input single output) users per cluster down- linking base station equipped with 128 antennas. HBF processing adopts phased zero forcing (P-ZF) for both fully connected (HBFNOMA) structure (FCS) and sub-connected (HBF-NOMA) structure (SCS) precoders’ optimization, and successive interference cancellation zero forcing (SIC-ZF) schemes to optimize the SCS-HBF-NOMA precoder exploiting dynamic power allocation. The new users’ pairing exploits users’ distance to the base station, namely near and far clusters different from the benchmark angle of arrival- based users’ pairing. The proposed users’ pairing and the precoding schemes’ impact are investigated for finite-resolution HBF structures operating in LOS and NLOS surroundings. The execution under New York University (NYU) mmW channel model is explored for two users in a cluster with different angles of arrival. Results show that the users’ pairing based on AoA performs better than the newly proposed users’ pairing. However, the proposed users’ pairing scheme performs better than their corresponding OMA counterparts, which still make them beneficial for multiple access technique and a scenario, where one of the far cluster users need to access the base station for high data rate service and vice versa. Finally, the modified Liang processing scheme for quantizing SCS-HBF-NOMA precoder is capable of mitigating the quantization error arising from the NLOS environment and the nature of sub-connected (HBF) structure under a low SNR regime.