On the Performance of Beam Division Nonorthogonal Multiple Access for FDD-Based Large-Scale Multi-User MIMO Systems

For the frequency division duplexing-based large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, we consider a multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme, referred to as beam division-NOMA (BD-NOMA), which is featured by a long-term feedback-based user grouping and clustering, along with a short-term feedback-based BD-NOMA scheduling. The performance of BD-NOMA is not warranted in practice because near users are severely interfered by strong signals for the far users of other beams, and furthermore, the long-term feedback-based user grouping and clustering might result in short-term inter-beam interference. We consider the short-term feedback-based joint optimization problem of user selection and power allocation for NOMA in each beam and system-wide power allocation for MU-MIMO, dealing with both intra-beam and inter-beam interference at the same time. We formulate a joint optimization problem for a large-scale MIMO system with the multiple channel quality indicators-based short-term feedback. In our analysis, we reformulate the original problem into an equivalent one that can be solved iteratively with the weighted minimum mean square error-based algorithm. Then, the performance analysis is presented to conclude that the proposed optimization is essential for enabling BD-NOMA to outperform beam division multiple access, especially when inter-beam interference becomes critical.