On the Ergodic Capacity and Energy Efficiency for Fading MIMO NOMA Systems

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is expected to be a promising multiple access techniques for 5G networks due to its superior spectral efficiency (SE). Previous research mainly focus on the design to improve the SE performance with instantaneous channel state information (CSI). In this paper, we consider the fading MIMO channels with only statistical CSI at the transmitter, and explore the potential gains of MIMO NOMA scheme in terms of both ergodic capacity and energy efficiency (EE). The ergodic capacity maximization problem is first studied for the fading multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) NOMA systems. We derive the optimal input covariance structure and propose both optimal and low complexity suboptimal power allocation schemes to maximize the ergodic capacity of MIMO NOMA system. For the EE maximization, the optimization problem is formulated to maximize the system EE (defined by ergodic capacity under unit power consumption) under the total transmit power constraint and the minimum rate constraint of the weak user. By transforming the EE maximization problem into an equivalent one-dimensional optimization problem, the optimal power allocation for EE design is proposed. To further reduce the computation complexity, a near-optimal solution based on golden section search and suboptimal closed form solution are proposed as well. Numerical results show that the proposed NOMA schemes significantly outperform the traditional orthogonal multiple access scheme with traditional orthogonal multiple access transmission in terms of both SE and EE.