Adaptive transmission mode switching in downlink MISO-NOMA systems: sum rate maximization and the achievable rate region

Abstract

In this paper, the design of adaptive transmission mode switching (TMS) to maximize the sum rate for the downlink multiple-input-single-output based non-orthogonal multiple access (MISO-NOMA) systems is investigated. Firstly, the colsed-form expressions of the boundary of achievable rate region of two candidate transmission mode, i.e., NOMA-based maximum ratio transmission (NOMA-MRT) and minimum mean square error beamforming (MMSE-BF), are obtained. By obtaining the outer boundary of the union of the achievable rate regions of the two transmission mode, an adaptive switching method is developed to achieve a larger rate region. Secondly, based on the idea that the solution to the problem of weighted sum rate (WSR) optimization must be on the boundary of achievable rate region, the optimal solutions to the problem of WSR optimization for NOMA-MRT and MMSE-BF are obtained, respectively. Subsequently, by exploiting the optimal solutions aforementioned for two transmission modes and the high efficiency of TMS, a low-complexity Joint User pairing and Power Allocation algorithm (JUPA) is proposed to further improve sum-rate performance for the multi-user case. Compared with the Exhaustive Search based user Pairing and Power Allocation algorithm (ES-PPA), the proposed JUPA can enjoy a much lower computation complexity and only suffer a slight sum-rate performance loss, whereas outperforms other traditional schemes. Finally, numerical results are provided to validate the analyses and the proposed algorithms.