Joint beamforming and power allocation in downlink NOMA multiuser MIMO networks

In this paper, a novel joint design of beamforming and power allocation is proposed for a multi-cell multiuser multiple-input multiple-output non-orthogonal multiple access network. In this network, base stations adopt coordinated multipoint for downlink transmission. We study a new scenario where the users are divided into two groups according to their quality-of-service requirements, rather than their channel qualities as investigated in the literature. Our proposed joint design aims to maximize the sum rate of the users in one group with the best effort while guaranteeing the minimum required target rates of the users in the other group. The joint design is formulated as a non-convex NP-hard problem. To make the problem tractable, a series of transformations is adopted to simplify the design problem. Then, an iterative suboptimal resource allocation algorithm based on successive convex approximation is proposed. In each iteration, a rank-constrained optimization problem is solved optimally via semidefinite program relaxation. Numerical results reveal that the proposed scheme offers significant sum-rate gains compared to the existing schemes and converges fast to a suboptimal solution.