Performance Analysis of Agile-Beam NOMA in Millimeter Wave Networks

Abstract

We propose an agile-beam non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme for millimeter wave (mmWave) communication networks. The agile-beam NOMA scheme flexibly switches between the single/multi-beam NOMA depending on the user pairing results. In particular, a novel user pairing strategy employing both distance and angle information is designed to facilitate the agile-beam NOMA transmission. More specifically, the base station first selects one user from the far user group randomly and then pairs it with the user that has the minimum angle difference in the near user group. This pairing strategy efficiently exploits the channel sparsity in user domain while supporting flexible mmWave transmission with agile-beam NOMA. Then an in-depth performance analysis is carried out to reveal the interplay between the key system parameters and the coverage probability of the proposed agile-beam NOMA by using the tool of stochastic geometry. Moreover, numerical results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed agile-beam NOMA over the conventional NOMA and orthogonal multiple access (OMA) in mmWave communication networks.

Keywords

• Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication
• non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)
• user pairing