Energy Efficient Beamforming Design for MISO Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access Systems

When considering the future generation wireless networks, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) represents a viable multiple access technique for improving the spectral efficiency. The basic performance of NOMA is often enhanced using downlink beamforming and power allocation techniques. Although downlink beamforming has been previously studied with different performance criteria, such as sum-rate and max-min rate, it has not been studied in the multiuser, multiple-input single-output (MISO) case, particularly with the energy efficiency criteria. In this paper, we investigate the design of an energy efficient beamforming technique for downlink transmission in the context of a multiuser MISO-NOMA system. In particular, this beamforming design is formulated as a global energy efficiency (GEE) maximization problem with minimum user rate requirements and transmit power constraints. By using the sequential convex approximation (SCA) technique and the Dinkelbach's algorithm to handle the non-convex nature of the GEE-Max problem, we propose two novel algorithms for solving the downlink beamforming problem for the MISO-NOMA system. Our evaluation of the proposed algorithms shows that they offer similar optimal designs and are effective in offering substantial energy efficiencies compared to the designs based on conventional methods.