Millimeter-wave communications with non-orthogonal multiple access for B5G/6G

In order to further improve the system capacity, we explore the integration of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in millimeter-wave communications (mmWave-NOMA) for future B5G and 6G systems. Compared with the conventional NOMA, the distinguishing feature of mmWave-NOMA is that, it is usually characterized by transmit/receive beamforming with large phased arrays. In this paper, we focus on the design challenges of mmWave-NOMA due to beamforming. Firstly, we study how beamforming affects the sum-rate performance ofmmWave-NOMA, and find that with conventional single-beam forming, the performance may be offset by the relative angle between NOMA users. Then, we consider multi-beam forming for mmWave-NOMA, which is shown to be able to achieve promising performance enhancement as well as robustness. Next, we investigate the challenging joint design of the intertwined power allocation and user pairing for mmWave-NOMA. Relevant challenges are discussed and some potential solutions are proposed in detail. We further consider hybrid spatial division multiple access (SDMA) and NOMA in mmWave communications, where some possible system configurations and the corresponding solutions are discussed to address the multi-user issues including multi-user precoding and multi-user interference mitigation. Finally, we present future directions in mmWave-NOMA and summarize the paper.