Limited Feedback-Based User Clustering for Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access in mmWave Systems

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and mmWave are considered to be promising techniques for 5G and beyond cellular network communication systems. While the mmWave band provides a very wide under-utilized bandwidth, NOMA enhances the spectral efficiency compared to orthogonal multiple access (OMA). The combination of these two techniques could be considered as the key solution to the high required data rates in next-generation communication systems. The implementation of NOMA is studied and verified under an ideal condition with perfect knowledge of the channel state information (CSI) at the base station (BS). However, under the practical conditions, the fluctuation of the wireless channel makes perfect CSI unachievable at the BS. Hence, we proposed to use the angle of departure (AoD) as feedback information from UEs to the BS. We assume that, mobile users (UEs) perfectly estimate the channel by detecting the pilot signals. Then, UEs quantize the AoD and feed back to the BS. Finally, the BS uses the AoD to perform user clustering, power allocation and beamforming. To reduce the feedback overhead further, we proposed a user clustering algorithm which uses one-bit feedback to determine the change of the AoD. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed NOMA system outperforms the conventional orthogonal multiple-access (OMA) system with the same amount of feedback information.