Transmit power minimization for vector-perturbation based NOMA systems: a sub-optimal beamforming approach

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is one of the potential multiuser supporting techniques in the fifth generation (5G) cellular systems due to its higher spectrum efficiency (SE) and cell-edge throughput. Vector-perturbation (VP) is widely known as one of the nonlinear precoding schemes that achieves near-capacity performance in practical wireless multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) communication systems. In this paper, we propose a hybrid transmission strategy based on VP and NOMA (VP-NOMA) by designing a beamforming matrix with the power allocation strategy to minimize total transmit power for certain quality of service (QoS) requirements. Rather than searching for the optimal beamforming matrix, we propose a more intuitive sub-optimal algorithm, called iteration beamforming for VP-NOMA systems (IBVP-NOMA), to find beamforming vectors. Further, different user clustering strategies are considered and compared to enhance the performance of the VP-NOMA systems. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method requires lower transmit power than the NOMA system without VP.