IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 68, NO.
4, APRIL 2020
Location-Based MIMO-NOMA: Multiple Access
Regions and Low-Complexity User Pairing
Jue Wang , Member, IEEE, Ye Li , Member, IEEE, Chen Ji, Qiang Sun ,
Shi Jin , Senior Member, IEEE, and Tony Q. S. Quek , Fellow, IEEE
Abstract— In this paper, we investigate the multiple input mul-
tiple output (MIMO)-non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)
transmission with the aid of location information. We first con-
sider two users separated in both the distance and angle domains.
With different access distances, NOMA could be used to serve
the near-user and the far-user simultaneously, whereas spatial
division multiple access (SDMA) would be applied if the two users
have largely-separated angles of departure (AOD) that guarantees
spatial orthogonality. Comparing the ergodic sum rates of these
two multiple access (MA) schemes, we first characterize the
preferable MA regions in the angle-distance plane. Analytical
expression of the region boundary between NOMA and SDMA
is derived. Moreover, NOMA-preferable regions are expressed
in terms of the maximum distance difference and the minimum
angle difference between the two users, respectively. On basis of
these results, we further propose a location-based low-complexity
user pairing algorithm for the general multiuser scenario.
Numerical results confirm the accuracy of the derived region
boundaries, and the simulations show that the proposed user
pairing algorithm can effectively improve the resource utilization
rate, compared to the conventional MA and user pairing schemes.
Index Terms— MIMO-NOMA, Rician fading, location
information, LOS beamforming, user pairing.
Manuscript received June 27, 2019; revised October 16, 2019 and
January 16, 2020; accepted January 17, 2020. Date of publication January 23,
2020; date of current version April 16, 2020. The work was supported in
part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants
61771264, 61801248, 61971467, the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu
Province under Grant BK20180943, and the Nantong University-Nantong
Joint Research Center for Intelligent Information Technology under Grant
KFKT2017B01. The work of S. Jin was supported in part by the National
Science Foundation (NSFC) for Distinguished Young Scholars of China with
Grant 61625106. The work of T. Q. S. Quek was supported in part by the
SUTD-ZJU Research Collaboration under Grant SUTD-ZJU/RES/01/2016,
and in part by the SUTD-ZJU Research Collaboration under Grant SUTD-
ZJU/RES/05/2016. The associate editor coordinating the review of this article
and approving it for publication was Y. Liu. (Corresponding author: Ye Li.)
Jue Wang and Ye Li are with the School of Information Science and
Technology, Nantong University, Nantong 226019, China, also with the
Research Center of Networks and Communications, Peng Cheng Laboratory,
Shenzhen 518066, China, and also with the Nantong Research Institute for
Advanced Communication Technologies, Nantong 226019, China (e-mail:
wangjue@ntu.edu.cn; yeli@ntu.edu.cn).
Chen Ji and Qiang Sun are with the School of Information Science
and Technology, Nantong University, Nantong 226019, China (e-mail:
gwidjin@ntu.edu.cn; sunqiang@ntu.edu.cn).
Shi Jin is with the National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory,
Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China (e-mail: jinshi@seu.edu.cn).
Tony Q. S. Quek is with the Information Systems Technology and Design
Pillar, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore 487372
(e-mail: tonyquek@sutd.edu.sg).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this article are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCOMM.2020.2968896
0090-6778 © 2020 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See https://www.ieee.org/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
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2293
I. I NTRODUCTION
W ITH the rapid development of 5G wireless and beyond,
the future communication networks are envisioned to
have an explosively increasing number of user terminals to be
connected. This requires new multiple access (MA) schemes to
allow more users to access the limited resource simultaneously.
To this end, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has
been proposed as a promising MA technology for future
wireless communication networks [1], [2]. Using superposition
coding (SC) at the transmitter and successive interference
cancelation (SIC) at the receiver, NOMA can serve multiple
users that are separable in the power domain without requiring
orthogonal time-frequency resources. Therefore, the number
of users that can be served in a network is greatly increased.
On the other hand, multiple input multiple output (MIMO)
technologies have been long investigated to exploit the spatial
dimension. By largely increasing the number of antennas in an
array to several tens, hundreds or even more, massive MIMO
shows great potential of providing a large number of spatially
orthogonal channels to realize spatial division multiple access
(SDMA) [3]. It is natural to consider the combining of NOMA
and MIMO in practical systems: When there exists a large
amount of users to be served, it is likely that multiple users
will fall in the same spatial beam formed by MIMO-SDMA.
In this case, NOMA could be used for MA of the users
who have similar spatial channels. The technique, denoted as
MIMO-NOMA, has attracted considerable research interests
in recent years [4]–[15].
The motivation of this work stems from the requirement of
designing efficient maritime wireless communications, which
has attracted increasing research interests recently [16]–[19].
In this scenario, a shore-based base station (BS) is deployed
to serve a large amount of maritime users distributed along
the sea lane. Two major challenges are to be faced: 1) The
transmission distance would be much longer than that inland,
which induces high path loss and large feedback delay; 2) Due
to practical deployment limitations, the density of shore-based
BSs will be much smaller than that of the maritime users,
rendering the system basically resource-limited. As such, it is
desired that one BS could serve more users on the same time-
frequency resource. While massive MIMO beamforming can
be used to compensate the high propagation loss, NOMA can
be deployed within each beam to further increase the number
of users that can be served.
2294
How to efficiently schedule MIMO beams and select
NOMA users is a key problem. Due to the long trans-
mission distance and dynamic wireless channels caused by
unpredictable sea wave and atmosphere conditions, it is
resource-consuming (if not impractical) to acquire instanta-
neous channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT).
Fortunately, location information could be easily obtained via
the automatic identification system (AIS) implemented on the
vessels [16], [17], and it is likely that the wireless channels
would be dominated by the LOS path due to sparse scattering.
This motivates our work to investigate the location-based
MIMO-NOMA user pairing and transmission.
A. Related Works
Determining the MA strategies for a group of users is impor-
tant in MIMO-NOMA transmissions. That is, to determine
which users should be served with SDMA, and which should
be served with NOMA. It should be noted that SDMA actually
treats the interference among users as noise, while NOMA
allows a strong user to decode and remove the interference
from other weaker users. Recently, an enlightening design,
termed as rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA), was shown
to be able to smoothly bridge these two extreme cases by
allowing partial of the interference to be decodable [20]–[24].
It was shown that RSMA unifies SDMA, OMA, NOMA and
multicasting, reduces to the other schemes under extreme
conditions, and outperforms them in the intermediate regime.
However, for our concerned scenario where the BS deploys
massive antenna array (Nt ) and serves hundreds of users
(M ), how to implement RSMA is not a trivial problem. The
1-layer RS scheme does not require user grouping, yet, its
computational complexity could be prohibitive when M 
Nt  1, according to the analysis in [24]. Though closed-
form precoder design and power allocation have been proposed
for RSMA in [23], it is only available for the two-user
case. On the other hand, as a simpler yet effective approach
(although it might not be optimal in the sense of the achievable
rate region), the MIMO-NOMA user pairing/clustering has
attracted considerable attentions in the literature.
The MIMO-NOMA user clustering problem is usually cou-
pled with the beamformer design, power allocation, and SIC
order determination, making it challenging to be explicitly
solved in practice. Many efforts have been done in the lit-
erature to address this issue. A common idea is to decouple
these problems by fixing part of them and focusing on the
remaining. In the early work [6], user clustering was first
conducted according to the instantaneous inter-user channel
correlations and channel gains, then zero forcing beamforming
(ZFBF) was applied to the clustered users. Similar ideas have
been adopted in the recent works [7], [8], where user clustering
algorithms were proposed based on the channel conditions,
subsequently, precoding and power allocation were designed
(either separately or jointly) according to the clusters formed
by the algorithms. In [9], random clustering and fixed power
allocation was firstly assumed to simplify the analysis, then
the study was extended to show the advantages of dynamic
power allocation and user pairing. Joint beamforming and
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 68, NO. 4, APRIL 2020
power allocation was investigated in [10] for a multi-cell
MIMO-NOMA network, where a QoS-based user grouping
and pairing strategy was assumed for the optimization. In [11],
a hybrid NOMA precoding scheme was proposed based on the
concept of quasi-degradation for two users, then the analysis
results were used to provide guidelines for the design of a
sequential multiuser pairing algorithm.
Most existing approaches rely on perfect CSIT. However,
acquiring full CSI tends to be challenging when Nt and
M both become large. Hence, it is of practical interest
to design MIMO-NOMA transmission with imperfect CSI.
Some approaches considered to avoid the acquisition of
full CSI, e.g., the random beamforming technique in [12],
and the beam domain transmission in [13] for mmWave
MIMO-NOMA systems. On the other hand, statistical CSI
such as the channel mean and covariance could be obtained
more easily at the transmitter [25], [26]. Exploiting the statis-
tical CSI, the ergodic capacity of MIMO-NOMA systems was
studied assuming Rayleigh fading in [14]. Statistical precoder
for a MISO-NOMA system was designed in [27], while mas-
sive MIMO-NOMA beamforming and user scheduling were
investigated in [15]. Moreover, the location information can
efficiently capture the channel characteristics when the scat-
tering is sparse and the line of sight (LOS) path dominates the
propagation, e.g., in mmWave communications (when there is
no blockage) or communications in the rural area [18], [28].
In these cases, location-based transmission shows promis-
ing performance and the implementation complexity can be
greatly reduced, see e.g., the specular beamforming or LOS
beamforming discussed in [29]–[31]. However, to the best
of our knowledge, utilizing the location information in
MIMO-NOMA systems is still open for investigation.
B. Contributions
In this paper, we investigate the MIMO-NOMA transmis-
sion using location information for determining MA strategies,
where the location of a user is characterized by its angle of
departure (AOD) θ and its access distance d. Intuitively, when
the users have different access distances, they are separable in
the power domain and therefore NOMA could be applied; on
the other hand, when the users have large AOD difference
to guarantee spatial orthogonality, implementing SDMA is
possible. However, for two users that are separable in both
the distance and angular domains, it is not clear whether it
is beneficial to serve these two users using NOMA with only
one spatial beam, or should we use two beams to cover these
two users using SDMA. Accordingly, two questions are to be
answered:
• Can we describe the preferable MA regions, and corre-
spondingly, the switching boundary between NOMA and
SDMA in the θ-d plane?
• How to form a feasible MIMO-NOMA transmission set
when multiple users are distributed in the network and
only their locations are known?
When there exist a large amount of users to be served, pre-
grouping of the users would be necessary to facilitate practical
transmission design. With massive antenna array implemented
WANG et al.: LOCATION-BASED MIMO-NOMA: MULTIPLE ACCESS REGIONS AND LOW-COMPLEXITY USER PAIRING
at the BS and spatially orthogonal users in each group,
location-based LOS beamforming provides a low-complexity
but effective way for realizing SDMA. On top of this system
assumption, NOMA can be further introduced to serve more
users on the same beam and therefore save the resource
consumption. Under this transmission framework, we inves-
tigate the user pairing according to the achievable sum rate.
Note that this is different from the conventional approaches
(e.g., [6]–[8]) where user pairing was heuristically done
according to the channel conditions. Aiming to answer the
questions raised above, we make the following contributions
in this work:
1) Considering Rician fading channels and location-based
LOS beamforming, we derive analytical approximations
for the ergodic sum rate achieved by two-user NOMA
and SDMA, respectively. The approximations are shown
to be tight and consist of only elementary functions.
To the best of our knowledge, this has not been reported
in the literature.
2) Using the derived rate expressions, we derive an
analytical expression for the switching boundary
between NOMA and SDMA in the θ-d plane.
Furthermore, we find that when the distance difference
between two users is larger than a threshold, or their
angle difference is smaller than a threshold, NOMA
will always be preferable. These thresholds are derived
analytically, which further facilitates the subsequent
user pairing design.
3) We apply the derived rate and MA region results to the
multiuser scenario, and propose a low-complexity user
pairing algorithm to form MIMO-NOMA transmission
sets based on location information only. Via simulations,
it is shown that the proposed algorithm can efficiently
reduce the required time-frequency resource, and
achieve higher resource utilization rate as compared to
the conventional MA and user pairing schemes when
the number of users is large.
C. Organization
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: The system
model is described in Section II. Section III provides the
ergodic sum rate analysis. In Section IV, we investigate the
MA region division in the angle-distance plane. For the general
multiuser scenario, a location-based user pairing algorithm is
proposed in Section V. Numerical and simulation results are
described in Section VI, and Section VII concludes this paper.
Notations: We use bold uppercase letters to denote matrices,
and bold lowercase letters for vectors. For a matrix X, we use
x(i) to denote its i-th row vector and x(j) to denote its
j-th column vector, respectively. X(i,j) is the (i, j)-th element
of X. By denoting A ≈ ˙ B, it means that the random variables
A and B are approximately equal in distribution.
II. S YSTEM M ODEL
A. User Pre-Grouping and SDMA
We consider a maritime communication system where a
shore-based BS is implemented with Nt antennas, serving
M users distributed in the area along the sea lane.
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2295
To compensate the severe path loss, massive MIMO beam-
forming is adopted at the BS, and we have M  Nt  1. As a
start point, user pre-grouping is conducted to facilitate SDMA.
Specifically, the users with near-orthogonal spatial channels
form a group, while a user cannot guarantee spatial orthog-
onality with the current group will be arranged in another
group, and served on a different time-frequency resource.
Within each group, maximum ration transmission (MRT) is
used to concentrate the signal power to every user’s direction,
as has been widely adopted in the massive MIMO literature.
Thanks to the orthogonality among the users’ channels, MRT
will achieve similar performance as the interference-nulling
techniques such as zero forcing (ZF), meanwhile, the MRT
admits a more tractable analytical framework when NOMA is
further introduced.
Atop this configuration, and suppose that every user has
already been allocated a beam (and a time-frequency resource),
we aim to determine whether another user can be served on the
same beam with a given user using NOMA. If yes, the total
number of required resources can be reduced. To this end,
we check the sum rate for two users given their locations: If
NOMA can achieve a better sum rate, then these two users can
be served on the same beam. In the ideal case, 2×Nt users can
be served on each time-frequency resource (with Nt beams and
2 users on each beam). Note that assuming 2 users for NOMA
might be not optimal, however, this is a widely-accepted
setting concerning the practical implementation complexity of
SIC [5]. For a user pair, we first describe the signal model and
transmission schemes in the following.
B. Signal Model for Two Users
Consider that the BS simultaneously serves two single-
antenna users with NOMA or SDMA. Denote the i-th user
as ui , i = 1, 2. The location of ui is characterized by (di , θi ),
where di is the access distance between ui and the BS, and
θi ∈ (− π2 , π2 ) is the AOD of ui , seen from the broadside
direction of the transmit antenna array. We assume that the
LOS path exists and the 1 × Nt -sized downlink channel vector
at ui is modeled by Rician fading,
 
K 1
hi = h̄i + h̃i , (1)
1+K 1+K
 −j2πd sin θ 
where h̄i = 1, e 0 i
, . . . , e−j2π(Nt −1)d0 sin θi ,
d0 is the inter-antenna spacing in carrier wavelength, and the
elements of h̃i follow i.i.d. complex Gaussian distribution.
Note that the more general spatially-correlated Rician fad-
ing model has attracted much attention recently [33], [34].
However, in maritime communications, there will be less
restriction on the array size at the shore-based BSs, hence
larger inter-antenna spacing can be used to guarantee spatially
uncorrelated channels. For the ease of description, we assume
that both users have the same value of K. In addition to
the fast fading in (1), we further consider large-scale path
−α
loss described by di 2 with α being the path loss exponent.
We define Δd = |d1 − d2 | as the distance difference between
u1 and u2 , and Δθ = |θ1 − θ2 | as the angle difference,
respectively. Without loss of generality, we assume d1 < d2 .
When comparing the channel strength of two users, the affect
2296 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 68, NO. 4, APRIL 2020

of fast fading is trivial as compared to that caused by the When SDMA is used, these SINRs read as
distance difference. Hence, we can say that u1 has a stronger γs ρd−α
1 |h1 w1 |
2
channel “almost surely” especially when Δd is large. More- SINRS1 = , (7)
over, we define (1 − γs )ρd−α
1 |h1 w2 | + 1
2

 2 (1 − γs )ρd−α
2 |h2 w2 |
2
 h̄1 h̄H  SINRS2 = . (8)
β   2 
. (2) γs ρd−α
2 |h2 w1 | + 1
2
||h̄1 || ||h̄2 || 
As the location is slowly time-varying, both precoding and
In contrast to Δθ which describes the physical angle differ- power allocation are conducted in a long-term manner. Hence,
ence, β describes the angle difference of two users in the we analyze and compare the performances of NOMA and
vectorial space in terms of the inter-channel correlation. SDMA considering the ergodic sum rate, which is given by
Suppose that NOMA is used in a transmission. The symbols (for k ∈ {N, S})
intended for u1 and u2 , namely s1 and s2 , are precoded and ⎡ ⎤
superposed for transmission at the BS. We apply a common   
precoding vector v ∈ CNt ×1 for both s1 and s2 . In this case,
k
Rsum = E⎣ log2 1 + SINRki ⎦ . (9)
the transmitted signal vector is given by i=1,2
√  
s= γn ρs1 + (1 − γn )ρs2 v, (3)
III. E RGODIC S UM R ATE A NALYSIS
where ρ is the transmit power normalized to noise, and γn is
In this section, we derive analytical expressions of (9) for
a power allocation coefficient.
NOMA and SDMA, respectively. First, note that provided a
On the other hand, if SDMA is used, the transmitted signal
fixed vector v, z  |hi v| follows Rician distribution [35] with
vector is written as
 the probability density function (PDF)
√    2 
s = γs ρw1 s1 + (1 − γs )ρw2 s2 , (4)
x mv x x + mv
fz (x) = 2 I0 exp − , (10)
with power allocation coefficient γs , and wi ∈ CNt ×1 is the σv σv2 σv2
SDMA precoding vector for ui .1 Note that if w1 and w2 are     
vH v K h̄ 
linearly dependent, (3) and (4) would have the same form. where σv = 2(1+K) = 2(1+K) 1
and mv = 1+K iv .
However, as the encoding methods for NOMA and SDMA Moreover,
are different, the corresponding SINRs (and correspondingly,  2
z
the achievable rates) will be different, as described in the ∼ χ2 (k, λ) (11)
following subsection. σv
follows
 non-central
2 chi-square distribution with k = 2 and
 2
C. Transmission Schemes and Achievable Rates λ = σvmv
= 2K i v . Similar conclusions also hold for
h̄
We assume that the transmitter exactly knows the locations the SDMA precoders wj , j = 1, 2.
of the users, and hence, h̄i in (1). For NOMA, we design v We can therefore express the sum rate in (9) as functions
following [6] which considers only the stronger user’s channel, of |hi v| for NOMA, and as functions of |hi wj | for SDMA.
i.e., u1 in our paper. Note that this might be not optimal, Specifically, with (5) and (6), the NOMA ergodic sum rate is
however, as will be shown later, it achieves satisfactory given by
performance while without rendering much modifications to     
N
= E log2 1 + aN1 |h1 v| + log2 1 + aN2 |h2 v|
2 2
the existing MIMO-SDMA system. Utilizing the location Rsum
information, v is designed to be aligned with the direction  
− log2 1 + aN3 |h2 v|
2
h̄H h̄H
, (12)
of h̄1 , i.e., v = ||h̄11 || . For SDMA, wi = ||h̄ii || , i =
1, 2 is adopted. Note that when Nt is large, this precoding where aN1 = γn ρd−α N −α N
1 , a2 = ρd2 , and a3 = γn ρd2 .
−α

design is asymptotically optimal as the channels of two users For SDMA, with (7), the ergodic rate for u1 (the results are
asymptotically become orthogonal when they are separable in symmetric for u2 ) is
the angle domain.   
R1S = E log2 1 + aS11 |h1 w2 |2 + aS12 |h1 w1 |2
The SINRs of the two users for NOMA transmission are   
respectively given by2 −E log2 1 + aS11 |h1 w2 |2 . (13)

SINRN1 = γn ρd−α
1 |h1 v| ,
2
(5) where aS11 = (1 − γs )ρd−α S −α 3
1 , a12 = γs ρd1 . For u2 , these
−α
(1 − γn )ρd2 |h2 v|2 parameters become a21 = γs ρd2 and a22 = (1 − γs )ρd−α
S −α S
2 .
SINRN2 = . (6) As |hi v| (and |hi wj |) is Rician distributed, various tech-
γn ρd−α
2 |h2 v| + 1
2
niques exist
 in the literature to solve the terms in the
2
1 For the ease of description, we denote all the channel vectors as row form of E log2 1 + a |hi v| in (12) and (13) [36]–[41].
vectors, and all the beamforming vectors, i.e., v and wi , i = 1, 2 as column
vectors throughout this paper. The result in [37, Equ. (5)] is given in terms of infinite
2 For the reasons that 1) d < d and 2) v is designed to be aligned with
1 2
the major direction of h1 , we can say that u1 has a stronger effective channel 3 When describing SDMA, we use the subscript “· ” to denote the j-th
ij
most probably. Hence, the SIC order is determined as u1 , u2 . term for user i.

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WANG et al.: LOCATION-BASED MIMO-NOMA: MULTIPLE ACCESS REGIONS AND LOW-COMPLEXITY USER PAIRING 2297

sum and the Meijer’s G function, rendering further analysis

complicated and intractable. In contrast to the conventional
PDF-based calculation methods, a unified moment generat-
ing function (MGF)-based calculation framework has been
proposed in [39]. The capacity can be computed with a
single integral as in [39, Theorem 1], knowing the MGF
of the receive SNR in Rician channel (which is referred
to [40, Equ. (22)]). The integral form, albeit efficient in evalu-
ating the ergodic capacity numerically, is still too cumbersome
to analytically find the switching boundary between the two
MA schemes.
As such, we turn to use the tight approximation tech-
nique which involves only
 elementary functions in [41, (10)].
According to [41], 1 + i ai x2i , where xi ’s are Rician distrib-
uted, can be approximated by a chi-square distribution with
degree of freedom l and scaling factor α, i.e., Fig. 1. Comparison of the analytical rate expressions in Prop. 1 and
 Prop. 2 with Monte Carlo simulations. Parameters: Nt = 10, K = 10,
αχ2 (l) ≈˙ 1+ ai x2i . (14) α = 3, d0 = 12 , γs = γn = 12 .
i

The values of α and l can be obtained by letting the first

two moments of both sides of (14) to be equal. With this where
approximation, it can be calculated that aS11 aS12
  AS11 = 1 + (1 + KNt β) + (1+KNt) , (22)
 1+K 1+K
E 1+ ai xi ≈ log2 (A) − C(l),
2
(15) aS11
AS12 = 1+ (1 + KNt β) , (23)
i 1+K
A  αl, (16) S
  and (l11 is described on bottom of the next page)
1 1 1 2
C(l)  + 2− . (17)  2
ln 2 l 3l 15l4 2 1 + 1+K
aS11
(1 + KNt β)
S
Note that C(l) decreases rapidly with l and converges to l12 =  S 2 . (25)
a11
zero asymptotically. This property will help to simplify our 1+K (1 + 2KNt β)
derivation for some special cases in the subsequent sections.
In the following, we use (15) to obtain tight analytical approx- The parameters for u2 , i.e., AS21 , AS22 , l21
S
, and l22S
can
N
imations for Rsum S
and Rsum , respectively. be similarly defined by simply changing the parameters as
Proposition 1: For the considered two-user downlink trans- aS11 → aS21 and aS12 → aS22 .
mission in Rician fading, a tight approximation for the ergodic Proof: See Appendix A-B. 
sum rate of NOMA is given by In Fig. 1, we compare the derived analytical rate expres-
sions in Proposition 1 and Proposition 2 with the Monte
N AN1 AN2  N  Carlo simulations. Equal power allocation is adopted as an
Rsum = log2 − C(l1 ) + C(l2N ) − C(l3N ) , (18)
AN3 example to demonstrate the accuracy of our derived analytical
rate results, nevertheless, the results in Proposition 1 and
where
Proposition 2 can be applied to arbitrary power allocations.
aNi The approximations are shown to be tight with different
ANi = 1 + (1 + Kbi ) , (19)
1+K parameter settings. As such, we can use them to efficiently
 2
aNi determine the MA region boundary by numerical means. From
2 1 + 1+K (1 + Kbi )
liN =  N 2 . (20) Fig. 1, it is shown that the NOMA sum rate outperforms
ai
(1 + 2Kb i ) SDMA as Δd becomes large, whereas SDMA performs better
1+K
with larger angle difference Δθ. This observation coincides
Here, aNi , i = 1, 2, 3 are defined in (12), and b1 = Nt , with our intuition. In the following, we further investigate the
b2 = b3 = Nt β. performance of these two MA schemes in the two-dimensional
Proof: See Appendix A-A.  Δθ-Δd plane.
Proposition 2: For the considered two-user downlink trans-
mission in Rician fading, a tight approximation for the ergodic IV. MA R EGIONS IN THE A NGLE -D ISTANCE P LANE
sum rate of SDMA is given by
In this section, we consider the NOMA/SDMA operating
S AS AS21 region division assuming γn = γs = γ. While this setting
Rsum = log2 11
AS AS might be not optimal in the sense of maximizing the sum rate,
 12 S 22 S  S   S 
− C l11 + C l21 − C l12 − C l22 , (21) the MA scheme selection can be decoupled with the power

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2298
Fig. 2. MA region division for NOMA and SDMA in the Δθ–Δd plane.
Parameters: K = 10, α = 3, d0 = 12 , γs = γn = 12 , d1 = 100,
θ1 = 0; d2 = d1 + Δd, θ2 = θ1 + Δθ.
allocation and relies only on the location information of users.
N S
Define the rate gap between Rsum and Rsum as
N S
G(Δd, Δθ) |d1 ,θ1 ,ρ,γ  Rsum − Rsum .
Given the location of u1 (d1 , θ1 ), the total available transmit
power (ρ), and the power allocation (γ), the gap is expressed
as a function of Δd and Δθ. With this definition, we can
identify the switching boundary between NOMA and SDMA
by solving G(Δd, Δθ) = 0. Before proceeding, we have the
following proposition which ensures the uniqueness of the
MA region boundary.
Proposition 3: Given Δθ, G(Δd, Δθ) |d1 ,θ1 ,ρ,γ is monoton-
ically increasing in terms of Δd.
Proof: See Appendix C.  according to the following two conditions, respectively:
A. An Example of the MA Region Division
We first show an example of the switching bound-
ary between NOMA and SDMA in Fig. 2. According to
Proposition 3, the boundary for a given Δθ can be easily
found by increasing Δd until G (Δd, Δθ) becomes positive.
The region above the curve is denoted as the NOMA region
N S
where Rsum ≥ Rsum (while the SDMA region is that below
the curve). It is observed that the SDMA region enlarges
as Nt increases. This is anticipated: Deploying more anten-
nas reduces the inter-beam interference, therefore it provides
higher abilities of MA in the spatial domain. Despite of the
oscillation in the boundary curve, it is observed that the SDMA
region generally enlarges with larger Δθ, and the NOMA
region enlarges with larger Δd. The reason is that larger
Δθ guarantees better spatial orthogonality, which is preferable
for SDMA; while larger Δd induces larger difference in the
power domain, which is preferable for NOMA.
S 2 (1 + K + aS11 (1 + KNt β) + aS12 (1 + KNt ))
l11 =
(1 + 2KNt β)(aS11 )2 + (1 + 2KNt )(aS12 )2 + 2(1 + 2KNt)βaS11 aS12
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 68, NO. 4, APRIL 2020
The switching boundaries are oscillating because the corre-
lation between h̄1 and h̄2 , i.e., β in (2), is in the form of sine
functions of the physical angle difference Δθ [42, Eq. (29)].
Clearly, a smooth boundary can be described in the β-Δd
plane. Nevertheless, we focus on the physical parameters here
to get more insights. As illustrated in Fig. 2, there exist
a maximum Δd and a minimum Δθ (denoted as ΔdNmax
N
and Δθmin , respectively), beyond which NOMA is always
beneficial. That is, when Δd > ΔdNmax , NOMA is always
preferable regardless of the value of Δθ. Similarly, when
N
Δθ < Δθmin , NOMA is always preferable regardless of Δd.
The points corresponding to ΔdNmax on the boundary appear
when SDMA achieves its best performance, i.e., when h̄1 and
h̄2 are orthogonal (β = 0). Thus, ΔdNmax can be obtained
N
by solving that G(Δd, Δθ |β=0 ) = 0. Similarly, Δθmin can be
found by solving G(0, Δθ) = 0. However, it is still challenging
to derive the boundary with arbitrary value of Nt and K. In the
next, we apply some assumptions to get concise and insightful
results for the MA region boundary.
B. Analysis for Large Nt and K
(26)
We consider that Nt  1 and K  1 (large but finite),
which is likely to happen in our interested maritime com-
munications scenario. The considered transmission scheme
asymptotically become optimal with these assumptions. On the
one hand, using h̄i for precoder design becomes accurate as
K increases; on the other hand, MRT become asymptotically
optimal as Nt → ∞.
As the relation between β and Δθ can be directly obtained
using [42, Eq. (28)], we discuss on β(Δθ) instead of Δθ for
ease of exposition. We further consider feasible simplifications
  1) the
value of β is larger or in a similar order of O N1t . As we
assume Nt  1, this assumption on β will be applicable for a
 of Δθ; 2) the value of β is in a order that is smaller
vast range
than O N1t , i.e., β → 0. In this case, the channels of u1 and
u2 are nearly orthogonal. This corresponds to the peak points
of the curves in Fig. 2, which can be used to find ΔdNmax
described therein. With condition 1), the following theorem
provides a concise analytical expression for the MA region
boundary.
Theorem 1: When Nt  1 and K  1 and for fixed power
allocation γn = γs = γ, the switching boundary for the two
  described by Δdbound at a given β
considered MA schemes,
(with O (β) ≥ O N1t ), is approximated by
 1 
Δdbound = d1 · η − α − 1 , (27)
C − C2
η=   1  , (28)
Nt aN1 C2 β + γ1 − 1 − C1 βγ
2
(24)
WANG et al.: LOCATION-BASED MIMO-NOMA: MULTIPLE ACCESS REGIONS AND LOW-COMPLEXITY USER PAIRING 2299

  
and C1 = (1 + Nt aN1 ) 1 + Nt aN1 β γ1 − 1 , C2 = 1 + should be, if possible, paired for NOMA transmission other
 
than SDMA. This would greatly simplify the system design as
Nt aN1 + Nt aN1 β γ1 − 1 . The error involved in calculating the
no rate calculation and comparison is needed for the pairing
achievable rates  for determining Δdbound is bounded in the of these users.
order of O K 1
.
Proof: See Appendix D. 
N
Using Theorem 1, an approximation for Δθmin in Fig. 2 can C. MA Regions With ZF and RSMA
be found in the following corollary. To have a more comprehensive understanding of the two-
Corollary 1 (The Minimum Angle Difference Below Which user MA regions, we incorporate the unified framework of
NOMA Is Always Preferable): For the considered two-user RSMA in [23] into our analysis. While it is challenging to
downlink transmission in Rician fading, NOMA is always analytically describe the region boundaries, the discussion in
N
preferable regardless of Δd when Δθ < Δθmin , where this subsection is based on numerical simulation. Different
 2 from [23], we assume that only location information is avail-
 N  γ −3+
1
3 − γ1 + 4Nt ρd−α 1 able and consider the ergodic rate. With RSMA, the ergodic
β Δθmin ≈ −α . (29) rate achieved by the common message is given by (31)
2Nt ρd1
(described on bottom of the next page), where wc /γc , wp,i /
Proof: It can be readily obtained by solving β with γp,i are the precoders/power allocation factors for the com-
Δdbound = 0 in (27).  mon message and the private message for ui , i = 1, 2, respec-
N
From Corollary 1, it can be seen that the value of β (Δθmin ) tively, satisfying that γc + γp,1 + γp,2 = 1. Under the ideal
decreases with Nt and ρ, in a scale of √1N and √1ρ , respec- assumption that both users can perfectly decode and remove
t
N
tively. Correspondingly, Δθmin is also decreasing with Nt , the interference from the common message, the ergodic rate
as will be shown later in simulations. This indicates that with achieved by the private message of ui reads as
more transmit antennas, SDMA can be employed for two users   
γp,i ρd−α
i |hi wp,i |
2
with small angle difference. The reason is straightforward, Rp,i = E log2 1 + , i
= j. (32)
as more antennas provide higher orthogonality between the 1 + γp,j ρd−α
i |hi wp,j |
2

two users’ channels. Another observation from Corollary 1 is
N
that β (Δθmin ) decreases with more transmit power, i.e., larger
values of ρ. Note that a smaller β in general corresponds to
N
a larger value of Δθmin , which means the NOMA-preferable
region enlarges with more power budget. That is, more degrees
of freedom can be exploited in the power domain. Note  that
 the location of u2 varies in the range of d2 ∈ (500 m, 1000 m)
Theorem 1 holds for the condition that O(β) ≥ O N1t ,
hence it cannot be directly used to derive ΔdNmax where β = 0.
Next, we find the values of ΔdNmin shown in Fig. 2 by directly
applying Propositions 1 and 2.
Corollary 2 (The Maximum Distance Difference Above
Which NOMA Is Always Preferable): For the considered two-
user downlink transmission in Rician fading, NOMA is always
preferable regardless of Δθ when Δd > ΔdNmax ,
 1  previously assumed.
−α
ΔdNmax ≈ d1 · ηmax −1 , (30)
where ηmax = 1
−α .
KNt −
ρd
1 that RSMA does not reduce to NOMA in our considered sys-
1+K
Proof: We directly apply Propositions 1 and 2 by setting
β = 0 and dropping C(l). Similarly to that described in the
proof of Theorem 1, it can be easily shown that the error
caused by dropping C(l) is bounded and tends to zero as
K → ∞. Then it is trivial to obtain the result by solving Δd
according to G(Δd, Δθ)|β=0 = 0.  for a certain location grid in Fig. 3, if RRSMA RRSMA
Corollary 2 shows that ΔdNmax increases with both Nt
and K, i.e., the NOMA-preferable region shrinks with more
transmit antennas and stronger LOS component. The reason is
straightforward, as larger values of Nt and K are preferable
for the LOS beamforming-based SDMA.
Remark 1: With Corollary 1 and Corollary 2, we see that
for two users whose distance difference is larger than the
derived threshold (or their angle difference is smaller than
the threshold), it can be directly concluded that these users
Thus, the achievable sum rate of RSMA is given by RRSMA =
Rc + i=1,2 Rp,i .
In Fig. 3, we investigate the operating regions of MRT,
NOMA, ZF, and RSMA in the distance-angle plane. In the
simulation, a user u1 is located at (d1 = 500 m, θ1 = 0), and
and θ2 ∈ (0, 0.2) (rad). For each location grid, we evaluate the
sum rate for the user pair under the considered transmission
schemes, respectively, and mark the grid with different colors
corresponding to the best scheme that achieves the highest sum
rate in this grid. ZF is implemented together with water-filling
power allocation, on top of this, the closed-form RSMA in [23]
is implemented. When NOMA is implemented, the common
precoder is selected to be aligned with u1 ’s LOS direction as
Note that it strictly holds that RRSMA ≥ RZF ≥ RMRT , since
RSMA generalizes the other two schemes (It should be noted
tem, as NOMA utilizes a different common precoder). How-
ever, these three schemes may have very similar performance
under certain conditions, e.g., when the spatial correlation
between the users’ channels is low. In this case, we select the
scheme with less implementation complexity. More precisely,
−RMRT
≤ 0.01,
RRSMA −RZF
the grid is marked as “MRT”; similarly, if RRSMA ≤ 0.01,
the grid is marked as “ZF”.
In the left column of Fig. 3, the MA regions are shown
for four transmission schemes. Note that the actual inter-
channel correlation is oscillating with the physical angles.
In the angle directions where high spatial orthogonality can be
guaranteed, MRT is the best choice, i.e., it achieves nearly the
same performance as RSMA/ZF with lower implementation
complexity. The RSMA region appears as the inter-channel

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2300 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 68, NO. 4, APRIL 2020

Fig. 3. The MA regions for a user pair in the angle-distance plane with u1 located at (θ1 = 0, d1 = 500) m, d2 ∈ (500 m, 1000 m), and θ2 ∈ (0, 0.2)
(rad). Left column: Four schemes (NOMA, MRT, ZF, RSMA) are considered; right column: consider only NOMA and MRT.

correlation becomes higher, i.e., when the two users have
highly-aligned channel directions. When the SNR is low,
the RSMA region is bounded by a maximum distance range,
in this example, around 700 m as shown in Fig. 3(a). This
is because the common rate allocation in RSMA is restricted
by the channel link quality of the weak user. As the SNR
increases, the RSMA region enlarges in both the distance and
the angle dimensions, as shown by Fig. 3(c) and Fig. 3(e).
Although RSMA and ZF show their advantages for one user
pair, they may cause more interference to the other user pairs
in the same user group, under our considered system model.
On contrary, considering only NOMA and MRT can efficiently
ease the inter-pair interference problem, given that the users
in a group are selected to have near-orthogonal channels.
Moreover, note that the low SNR regime is of more importance
in maritime communications due to the long transmission
distance. In this regime, the RSMA region becomes smaller as
shown in Fig. 3(a). Besides, the MRT region will enlarge with
larger Nt (where the users’ channels are more orthogonal).
For these reasons, we focus on MRT beamforming and apply
NOMA within each beam. In the right column of Fig. 3,
we compare NOMA and MRT under the same simulation
setting. The NOMA region is enlarged when RSMA and ZF
are not considered, and it can be directly determined by the
users’ locations, using our derived analytical rate expressions.
V. L OCATION -BASED U SER PAIRING
In this section, we apply the previous results to the
multiuser scenario and investigate the MIMO-NOMA user
pairing based on location information. The preferable
MA mode for any two users can be determined by com-
paring their locations with the switching boundary described
in Theorem 1 (If dynamic power allocation is conducted,
the switching boundary can be numerically found with Propo-
sitions 1 and 2). In practice, an orthogonal resource can be
used to serve a set of users with multiple spatial beams,
while each beam covers a NOMA pair. We define this
set of users as a MIMO-NOMA set. If a new user cannot
be added into the current MIMO-NOMA set (i.e., it can-
not guarantee spatial orthogonality with the existing beams,
and it cannot be paired for NOMA with another user in
the current set, neither), it will be arranged into another
MIMO-NOMA set and served by a different orthogonal
resource. Given a total user set S = {u1 , . . . , uM }, sup-
pose that N MIMO-NOMA sets can be formed according
to the preferable MA modes of the users. Denote the n-th

   
γc ρd−α
1 |h1 wc |
2
Rc = E min log2 1 + ,
1 + γp,1 ρd1 |h1 wp,1 |2 + γp,2 ρd−α
−α
1 |h1 wp,2 |
2

  
γc ρd−α
2 |h2 wc |
2
log2 1 + (31)
1 + γp,1 ρd2 |h2 wp,1 |2 + γp,2 ρd−α
−α
2 |h2 wp,2 |
2

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WANG et al.: LOCATION-BASED MIMO-NOMA: MULTIPLE ACCESS REGIONS AND LOW-COMPLEXITY USER PAIRING 2301

MIMO-NOMA set as SnM−N  {(un1,1 , un1,2 ), . . . , (unkn ,1 , Algorithm 1 Location-Based User Pairing for MIMO-NOMA
unkn ,2 )}, where (uni,1 , uni,2 ), i = 1, . . . , kn is the i-th NOMA 1: Input: S
pair with uni,1 , uni,2 ∈ S, and kn is the number of NOMA pairs 2: Output: Sn M−N
, n = 1, . . . , N  N is to be minimized
in this MIMO-NOMA set. An objective is to design efficient 3: Initialization: n = 1
user pairing algorithm to generate SnM−N , n = 1, . . . , N , 4: Initialization: Sn M−N
=∅
such that N can be minimized. As each SnM−N occupies an  M−N
5: Set T1  S \ Sn
orthogonal resource, this is to reduce the number of resources n
required to serve the total user set. 6: if T1 == ∅ then
The problem is formally formulated as 7: End of Algorithm
8: end if
minimize N, (33) 9: while T1
= ∅ do
M−N
Sn ,n=1,...,N 10: Initialization: i = 1
s.t. S1M−N ∪ ... ∪ SN
M−N
= S, (34) 11: Select uni,1 from T1
M−N M−N
Si ∩ Sj = ∅, ∀i
= j, (35) 12: Determine RNuni,1 and RSuni,1

β(θin − θjn ) < βth , 13: if T2  T1 RNuni,1
= ∅ then
14: Select uni,2 from T2
∀n ∈ {1, . . . , N }, ∀i, j ∈ {1, . . . , kn }, (36)
15: Determine RSuni,2
uni,2 ∈ RNuni,1 , ∀n ∈ {1, . . . , N }, ∀i ∈ {1, . . . , kn }. SnM−N ← (u  i,1 ,S ui,2) S
n n
16:
(37) 17: T1 ← T1 Runi,1 Runi,2
18: i ← i + 1, go to 11
where in (36), θin denotes the direction of the i-th spatial 19: else if T2 == ∅ then
beam in the n-th MIMO-NOMA set. Therefore, (36) is to 20: SnM−N ← (u  i,1 ,S 0)
n
guarantee that the spatial correlation among the beams in every 21: T1 ← T1 Runi,1
MIMO-NOMA set is below a certain threshold. In (37), 22: i ← i + 1, go to 11
RNuni,1 denotes the set which consists of all the users who fall in 23: end if
the NOMA region of uni,1 . The problem is a combinatorial opti- 24: end while
mization problem, which is difficult to tackle especially when 25: Output ← SnM−N
the number of users is large. In the following, we propose a 26: n ← n + 1, go to 4
heuristic algorithm for this problem with low implementation
complexity.
B. Inter-Beam Interference
A. Location-Based User Pairing Algorithm In this subsection, we discuss on the inter-beam interference
when applying the two-user rate results to the multiuser
The location-based user pairing algorithm is described in scenario. With Algorithm 1, given a target user, another user
Algorithm 1. In Step 5, T1 is initialized as the set which whose location falls in its SDMA region will be allocated
contains all the remaining users that have not been sched-
another beam. It can be calculated from Theorem 1 that the
uled yet. The loop from Step 9 to Step 24 tries to form worst-case inter-beam interference would be in a similar scale
a MIMO-NOMA set with the users in T1 . In Step 11, the first
of the noise level. Modifications to Algorithm 1 could be made
user for the i-th NOMA pair is selected (this could be done
to deal with the inter-beam interference from the following two
either randomly or according to certain criterion, e.g., selecting perspectives.
the nearest user), denoted as uni,1 , then its NOMA and SDMA
regions are calculated with Theorem 1, respectively. If T1 1) Control the Per-Beam Interference: An offset value
contains users which locate in the NOMA region of uni,1 , could be added to the inter-channel correlation β when
 applying Theorem 1 in Algorithm 1, Step 12. In this way,
i.e., T2  T1 RNuni,1
= ∅, then select uni,2 from T2 to form
M−N
the two-user SDMA region is effectively reduced, and
a NOMA pair with u n
 SSn with (ui,1 , ui,2 ), and
i,1 . Update
n n
the users have to guarantee higher spatial orthogonality
S
update T1 as T1 ← T1 Runi,1 Runi,2 , that is, the subsequent to be allocated with different beams.
user pairing for this MIMO-NOMA set must be conducted 2) Control the Total Interference: Note that Algorithm 1 is
within the intersection of the SDMA regions of all scheduled greedy, i.e., it tends to pack as many users as possible
users, to guarantee spatial orthogonality between different in the current MIMO-NOMA set. This might result
NOMA pairs. On the other hand, if T2 = ∅, i.e., there does in unbalanced number of users per set. As a result,
not exist a user in the remaining user set that can form a the sets with more users may suffer from larger inter-
NOMA pair with uni,1 ; in this case, uni,1 itself occupies the ference among the NOMA pairs, while the set with
corresponding spatial direction, while SnM−N and T1 are updated small number of users may reduce the pairing efficiency.
as described in Steps 20 and 21. Repeat Step 9 to Step 24 until To address this problem, Algorithm 1 can be modified
T1 = ∅, which accomplishes the  formulation of SnM−N ; repeat by setting a maximum allowed number of NOMA pairs
M−N
the entire procedure until S \ Sn = ∅, which arrives at per set (denoted as Ns ) in Step 9. When Ns is achieved,
n
the end of this algorithm. the current while loop ends regardless of T1 and the

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2302 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 68, NO. 4, APRIL 2020

algorithm proceed to schedule the remaining users for

the next MIMO-NOMA set. In the simulations, it will
be shown that this modification can efficiently improve
the resource utilization rate.

C. Complexity Analysis
We briefly evaluate the complexity of Algorithm 1 in terms
of the number of location comparisons that needs to be
conducted. Considering that the maximum allowed number
of NOMA pairs per MIMO-NOMA set is Ns . For the ease of
analysis, suppose that each NOMA pair consists of 2 users.
While this might not be true in practice, we can use it as a
baseline to characterize the complexity. Approximately, there
will be 2 MNs MIMO-NOMA sets formed. During the formation
of each set, the number of location comparisons is calculated
as (2Ns − 1) + (2Ns − 3) + ... + 3 = Ns2 − 1. Overall, the total
number of comparisons Fig. 4. MA region division in the β–Δd plane. Parameters: K = 20,
 at sthe
 end of the algorithm would Nt = 64, α = 3, d0 = 12 , γs = γn = 12 , d1 = 200, θ1 = 0.
be in the order of O MN 2 , which is linear with respect
to the total number of users provided that Ns is fixed. For
the original Algorithm 1, its complexity can be obtained by
letting Ns = M . In this case, the number
 2  of comparisons
conducted would be in the order of O M2 . Note that once
the MA region boundary for each user has been calculated
using Theorem 1, the complexity of conducting location
comparison is actually trivial for practical implementations,
even when the user number is large. Moreover, Corollary 1 and
Corollary 2 can be applied to further reduce the searching
space and therefore increase the algorithm efficiency.
We further show the required modifications when applying
Algorithm 1 to an existing MIMO-SDMA system (with pre-
grouped users) in Table I. As discussed, RSMA may have
a better performance, but at the cost of higher precoding
complexity (for the 1-layer and per-group RSMA) or inducing
additional interference to the other user pairs in the same
group (for the per-pair RSMA). The MIMO-NOMA frame- N


Fig. 5. β Δθmin for the NOMA-preferable region vs. the number of
work provides an effective low-complexity solution for the transmit antennas. Parameters: K = 20, α = 3, d0 = 12 , γs = γn = 12 ,
enhancement of the MIMO-SDMA system, as will be further d1 = 200, θ1 = 0.
demonstrated by the performance simulations shown in the
next section.
higher SNR. This can be explained that more power provides
VI. N UMERICAL AND S IMULATION R ESULTS more degree of freedom in the power domain, which is
Numerical and simulation results are shown in this section. preferable for NOMA transmission.
First, The MA regions are shown in the β–Δd plane in Fig. 4, In Fig. 4, the intersection point between each boundary
where three boundaries are provided at different reference curve and the x-axis indicates the largest value of β, above
SNR values (ρd−α 1 in dB). The region above each curve is which NOMA will be always preferable regardless of Δd.
the NOMA region, where NOMA performs better than SDMA. This corresponds to the smallest physical angle difference
N
As shown in the figure, the analytical expression for the region Δθmin previously shown in Fig. 2. We compare the derived
N
boundary derived in Theorem 1 well matches the Monte Carlo analytical expression of β (Δθmin ) with Monte Carlo simu-
results, even in the regime that O(β) is smaller than N1t . lations in Fig. 5, where it is shown that the approximation
Therefore, it can be efficiently used in practice to determine the in Corollary 1 is tight. For a given Nt , it is shown that
N
best MA scheme for two given users. Furthermore, we observe β (Δθmin ) decreases with the SNR, which corresponds to
N
that the NOMA region enlarges with larger Δd, with which a larger physical angle difference Δθmin and, consequently,
the two users could be more distinguishable in the power a larger NOMA-preferable region. Again, the reason is that
domain; on the other hand, the SDMA region becomes larger higher transmit power provides more ability for distinguishing
at smaller value of β, i.e., with higher spatial orthogonality two users in the power domain. Note that the value of
N N
between the two users’ channels. Moreover, we can see that the β (Δθmin ) decreases with Nt , whereas Δθmin also decreases
NOMA region enlarges when more power is available, i.e., at with Nt as shown in Fig. 2. The decreasing in β is caused

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WANG et al.: LOCATION-BASED MIMO-NOMA: MULTIPLE ACCESS REGIONS AND LOW-COMPLEXITY USER PAIRING 2303

TABLE I
R EQUIRED M ODIFICATIONS TO AN E XISTING MIMO-SDMA S YSTEM

Fig. 6. ΔdNmax for the NOMA-preferable region vs. the number of transmit
antennas. Parameters: α = 3, d0 = 12 , γs = γn = 12 , d1 = 100, θ1 = 0.
Reference SNR: 10 dB.
by the increasing of Nt , where for a given Δθ, a larger Nt
generally reduces the corresponding value of β. Moreover,
ΔdNmax for the NOMA-preferable region is illustrated versus
Nt for different values of K in Fig. 6. It is shown that the
approximation derived in Corollary 2 is tight even at moderate
value of K. We further observe that ΔdNmax increases with
both Nt and K, indicating that the NOMA-preferable region
will shrink with more transmit antennas and more dominant
LOS path.
We next provide an example of the user pairing result
in Fig. 7, where 10 users are randomly distributed in the
considered angle and distance range. In the figure, different
colors are used to describe different MIMO-NOMA sets, while
the same marker is used to denote a NOMA pair. For the
case that there exists only a single marker, it means that the
corresponding user cannot find another user to form a NOMA
pair, thereby, it occupies the spatial direction all by itself.
Fig. 7 shows that by using Algorithm 1, users with similar
angular directions and separable access distances are paired
for NOMA. Note that the users around the direction of 15◦
are densely distributed in the angular domain, therefore, they
are arranged in different MIMO-NOMA sets to avoid spatial
interference. At last, the two users marked with black circle
Fig. 7. An example to show the user pairing result of Algorithm 1. Para-
meters: Nt = 20, α = 3, d0 = 12 , γ = 12 . 10 users are randomly distributed
π π
within the angle range (− 10 , 10 ) and the distance range (200 m, 1000 m).
Reference SNR: 10 dB.
and red triangle cannot find another appropriate user to pair
with, as a result, these two users occupy the corresponding
spatial directions all by themselves, respectively.
In Fig. 8, we demonstrate the average number of
MIMO-NOMA sets formed by Algorithm 1 versus the total
number of users. It is shown that the number of formed
MIMO-NOMA sets increases with the number of users. How-
ever, the number of sets is much smaller than the number of
users, indicating that the required time-frequency resources
can be greatly reduced by using the proposed algorithm.
As the number of transmit antennas increases, the number
of formed sets can be further reduced. Note that according
to Fig. 2, the NOMA region actually shrinks with larger
number of antennas, which means less NOMA pairs can be
formed. However, Algorithm 1 allows a single user to occupy
the corresponding spatial direction when there does not exist
another user to pair with. As increasing the number of antennas
actually increases the number of available spatial directions,
MA for more users could be done in the spatial domain.
Correspondingly, the number of transmission sets is reduced
with larger Nt .

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2304 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 68, NO. 4, APRIL 2020

utilization rate in general decreases with the number of users.

This is because full CSIT is not available in our considered
scenario, hence interference limits the system performance as
the number of users becomes large. Nevertheless, the proposed
Algorithm 1 outperforms the others in the regime with large
number of users, which could be the typical regime in maritime
communications, where a large number of users are distributed
along the sea lane. More importantly, it is shown that by
applying Algorithm 1 to the existing MIMO-OFDM system,
the resource utilization rate can be improved. This combined
approach achieves the highest resource utilization rate over
most of the user number regimes.

VII. C ONCLUSION
We investigated MIMO-NOMA transmission using only
Fig. 8. Average number of feasible MIMO-NOMA sets (formed by location information. Considering Rician fading and using
π π
Algorithm 1) vs. the total number of users. Angle range: (− 10 , 10 ); location-based LOS beamforming, we first derived tight ana-
Distance range (200 m, 2000 m); Parameters: α = 3, d0 = 12 , γ = 12 . lytical approximations of the ergodic sum rate for two-user
Reference SNR: 10 dB.
NOMA and SDMA, respectively. With this result, we found
the MA region boundary in the Δθ-Δd plane for two users.
The boundary result was further applied in the multiuser
scenario to aid the design of a low-complexity location-based
user pairing algorithm. The proposed algorithm was shown to
be effective in reducing the required number of time-frequency
resources and increasing the resource utilization rate.

A PPENDIX A
P ROOF OF P ROPOSITION 1 AND P ROPOSITION 2
A. NOMA
According to (10) and (11), |hi v|2 is chi-square distributed.
As in [41], 1 + a|hi v|2 can be approximated by a chi-square
distribution with degree of freedom l and scaling factor α, i.e.,
αχ2 (l) ≈˙ 1 + a|hi v|2 . Let the first two moments of both sides
of this equation to be equal,
a   2 
Fig. 9. Achievable rate per resource vs. the number of users. Results αl = 1 + 1 + K h̄i v , (38)
1+K
are averaged over 400 snapshots. In each snapshot, the users are uniformly  2 
randomly generated from the angle range (− 20 π π
, 20 ) and distance range a  2 
(200 m, 2000 m); Parameters: Nt = 64, α = 3, d0 = 12 , γ = 12 . 2α2 l = 1 + 2K h̄i v . (39)
Reference SNR at 1000 m: 10 dB.
1+K
h̄H
Since v = ||h̄11 || , we have |h̄1 v|2 = Nt and |h̄2 v|2 = Nt β.
For the three terms in (12), different values of a are provided
At last, we investigate the resource utilization rate (in under (12). Correspondingly, the values of αl and l for these
terms of the achievable rate per resource) versus the number terms can be calculated using (38) and (39). The expectation of
of users in Fig. 9. Five approaches are compared, namely each term can be then tightly approximated as (15). Combining
1) MIMO-OFDM: the users with inter-channel correlation less the approximations for all three terms leads to the result
than βthres form a user set and are served with different in Proposition 1.
MIMO beams on the same resource; 2) OMA: Every user
is allocated with an orthogonal resource; 3) Pairing method B. SDMA
in [6]: For a given u1 , first identify the user set Su1 which
contains all the users whose inter-channel correlation with We focus on u1 as the case is symmetric for u2 . We rewrite
u1 is larger than βthres , then select u2 ∈ Su1 who has the (13) here as
  
largest distance difference to form a NOMA pair with u1 ; R1S = E log2 1 + aS11 |h1 w2 |2 + aS12 |h1 w1 |2
4) Algorithm 1 with Ns = 10; and 5) Algorithm 1 applied on   
−E log2 1 + aS11 |h1 w2 |2 . (40)
top of the existing MIMO-OFDM system. For both 1) and 3),
we set βthres = 0.03. Under the considered parameter setting, The second term in (40) can be directly evaluated using the
this approximately corresponds to a physical angle difference previous results in Appendix A-A, leading to the results of
of 3◦ . It is shown that for all the approaches, the resource AS12 and l12
S
in (23) and (25).

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WANG et al.: LOCATION-BASED MIMO-NOMA: MULTIPLE ACCESS REGIONS AND LOW-COMPLEXITY USER PAIRING 2305

For the first term in in (40), again, we use the approximation in the form of E [AW2 B]. Checking its (i, j)-th element,
technique in [41] and get we have
    
˙ 1 + aS11 |h1 w2 |2 + aS12 |h1 w1 |2
αχ2 (l) ≈ (E [AW2 B])(i,j) = E a(i) W2 b(j) = tr W2 E b(j) a(i) .
 1 + aS11 X + aS12 Y. (41) (50)
Let the first moment of both sides of (41) to be equal, we have
Noting that H̄1 is deterministic, and applying (50),
aS11   2   non-zero  terms as
αl = 1 + 1 + K h̄1 w2  it  is trivial to calculate the
1+K E H̄1 W2 H̄1 = H̄1 W2 H̄1 , E H̄1 W2 H̃1 = H̄1 W2 ,
aS12   2     
+ 1 + K h̄1 w1  . (42) E H̃1 W2 H̄1 = W2 H̄1 , E H̃1 W2 H̃1 = W2 + tr (W2 ) I,
1+
 K     
and E H̃ ¯ + H̃¯ H W H̃ ¯ + H̃¯H = tr (W2 ) H̄ +
2α2 l = Var aS11 X + aS12 Y . (43) 1 2 1
  1 1
tr W2 H̄ I. Substituting these terms into (48), we have
As X and Y are correlated, we have
 
Var aS11 X + aS12 Y = (aS11 )2 Var [X] + (aS12 )2 Var [Y ] E [XY ]
  
1  
+2 · Cov aS11 X, aS12 Y , (44) = × K 2 tr W1 H̄1 W2 H̄1
 (1 + K)2
 2      
where Var [X] = (1+K) 1
2 1 + 2K h̄1 w2  and Var [Y ] = +K tr W1 H̄1 W2 + tr W2 H̄1 W1
  2 
1
1 + 2K h̄ w  . Moreover, Cov [aS X, aS Y ] = +tr (W1 W2 ) + tr (W1 ) tr (W2 )
(1+K)2 1 1 11 12 
    
aS11 aS12 (E [XY ] − E [X] E [Y ]), where E[X] and E[Y ] have +K tr(W2) tr W1 H̄1 +tr (W1) tr W2 H̄1 . (51)
been given on the right hand side of (42), and the calculation
of E [XY ] is described in Appendix B. Combining these
h̄H h̄H
results, recalling that w1 = ||h̄11 || , w2 = ||h̄22 || and after some A PPENDIX C
simplifications, we have P ROOF OF P ROPOSITION 3
  (1 + 2KNt ) aS11 aS12 The conclusion can be readily confirmed by numerical
Cov aS11 X, aS12 Y = 2 β, (45)
(1 + K) means. For analytical proof, it needs to calculate the derivative
of G(·) with respect to Δd, which is too complex to handle.
and correspondingly,
  However, we can use some simplifications to obtain a brief
Var aS11 X + aS12 Y sketch of the proof, as described in the following.
 Provided that d1 , θ1 , ρ, γ and Δθ are fixed, the changing in
1
= (aS11 )2 (1 + 2KNtβ) G(·) only depends on the terms related to d2 , i.e., ANi and liN ,
(1 + K)2
 i = 2, 3 for NOMA, and AS2j , l2j S
, j = 1, 2 for SDMA. In this
+(aS12 )2 (1 + 2KNt ) + 2aS11 aS12 (1 + 2KNt) β . (46) case, G(·) is rewritten as

Substituting this result in (43) and along with (42), G(Δd, Δθ) |d1 ,θ1 ,ρ,γ = Ḡ + G̃(Δd), (52)
αl and l can be obtained as (22) and (24), shown
at the bottom of page 6, respectively. Further apply- where Ḡ is a constant determined by d1 , θ1 , ρ, γ and Δθ, and
ing the rate approximation (15), Proposition 2 can be AN2 AS22  N 
obtained. G̃(Δd) = log2 N S − C(l2 )−C(l3N )−C(l21
S S
)+C(l22 ) .
A3 A21
(53)
A PPENDIX B
C ALCULATION OF E [XY ] FOR (45) Note that with γs = γn = γ, we have aN3 = aS21 . Corre-
According to (41), and denoting that Wi  wi wiH and spondingly, AN3 = AS22 . Therefore, the log(·) term in (53) is
AN
Hi  hH
i hi , we can write simplified to log2 AS2 , then it is trivial to show that this is an
21
  increasing function of Δd.
E [XY ] = E h1 W2 hH1 · h1 W1 h1
H
   For the remaining term related to C(·), similarly, aN3 = aS21
= E tr W1 · hH1 h1 W2 h1 h1
H
(47) leads to l3N = l22
S
. As such, we focus only on C(l2N ) − C(l21 S
).
= tr (W1 E [H1 W2 H1 ]) , (48) On the one hand, it can be shown that when Δd is small,
the difference between l2N and l21 S
is trivial such that the value
where according to (1), of C(l2N )−C(l21S
) is negligible as compared to the value of the
√
K 1 K ¯ 
¯ H , (49)
log(·) term in (53); on the other hand, when Δd is large, both
H1 = H̄1 + H̃1 + H̃1 + H̃ C(l2N ) and C(l21
S
) will tend to zero. Therefore, we can conclude
1+K 1+K 1+K 1
that the terms related to C(·) in general do not affect the
¯  h̄H h̃ .
where H̄  h̄H h̄ , H̃  h̃H h̃ , and H̃ monotonicity of (53). Combining these results, the proposition
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Using (49) to calculate E [H1 W2 H1 ] in (48) produces 9 terms can be proved.

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2306
A PPENDIX D
P ROOF OF T HEOREM 1
 
When the value of β is greater than the order of O N1t ,
the order of the values of bi , i = 2, 3 will be greater than O(1)
(while b1 = Nt ). As such, liN , i = 1, 2, 3 can be simplified as
(1 + aNi bi )2
liN → K · 2 . (54)
(aNi ) bi
Note that the fraction part in (54) is larger than bi , i.e., in an
order greater than O(1). Hence, the value of liN is in an order
of, at least, O(K), which is large as assumed. In this case,
we can drop C(l) in (15) while concluding
1 that the induced
error is bounded in the order of O K . less communication based on LTE technology,” IEEE Access, vol. 7,
As described in Appendix C, we have AN3 = AS22 . Hence,
the MA region boundary now can be simply obtained by
solving that
AN1 AN2 AS12
log2 = 0. (55)
AS11 AS21
According to (19), (22), (23), and considering that Nt  1
and K  1, we have AN1 → 1 + Nt aN1 , AN2 → 1 + Nt βaN2 ,
AS12 → 1 + Nt βaS11 , AS11 → 1 + Nt βaS11 + Nt aS12 , and AS21 →
1 + Nt βaS21 + Nt aS22 . Further noting that aN1 = aS12 = ρd−α 1 −
aS11 , and γaN2 = aS21 = ρd−α 2 − a S
22 , it is trivial to get the
solution of (55) as proposed in the Theorem.
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Jue Wang (Member, IEEE) received the B.S. degree
in communications engineering from Nanjing Uni-
versity, Nanjing, China, in 2006, and the M.S. and
Ph.D. degrees from the National Communications
Research Laboratory, Southeast University, Nanjing,
in 2009 and 2014, respectively.
From 2014 to 2016, he was with the Singapore
University of Technology and Design (SUTD) as
a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow. He is currently
with the School of Information Science and Tech-
nology, Nantong University, Nantong, China, also
with the Research Center of Networks and Communications, Peng Cheng
Laboratory, Shenzhen, China, and also with the Nantong Research Institute
for Advanced Communication Technologies, Nantong. His research interests
include MIMO/massive MIMO wireless communications and machine learn-
ing in communication systems.
Dr. Wang has served as a Technical Program Committee member and a
reviewer for a number of IEEE conferences/journals. He was awarded as
an Exemplary Reviewer of IEEE T RANSACTIONS ON C OMMUNICATIONS
in 2014.
Ye Li (Member, IEEE) received the B.S. degree
in information engineering and the M.S. degree in
information and communication engineering from
Southeast University, Nanjing, China, in 2007 and
2010, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from
Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada, in 2014.
From 2014 to 2016, he was with IBM Canada
Ltd., Markham, ON. He has been with Nantong
University, Nantong, China, since 2016, where he
is currently an Associate Professor. Meanwhile, he
is also with the Research Center of Networks and
Communications, Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China, and the Nantong
Research Institute for Advanced Communication Technologies, Nantong. His
main research interests include wireless communication networks, error-
control coding, and network coding.
Dr. Li has served as a Technical Program Committee member for a number
of IEEE conferences, and a reviewer for several IEEE journals. He was the
TPC Co-Chair of the Mobile and Wireless Networks Symposium of IEEE
ICC 2019, Shanghai.
Chen Ji graduated from the Nanjing University
of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, China,
in 1999, and the M.S. degree from the Beijing Uni-
versity of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing,
China, in 2002, and the Ph.D. degree from Southeast
University, Nanjing, in 2015. He joined the School
of Information Science and Technology, Nantong
University, Nantong, China, in 2015. His research
interests are in the areas of coding and modulation
for wireless communications, and multiple-access
edge computing.
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2307
Qiang Sun received the Ph.D. degree in commu-
nications and information systems from Southeast
University, Nanjing, in 2014. He worked as a Visit-
ing Scholar with the University of Delaware, USA,
in 2016. He is currently an Associate Professor
with the School of Information Science and Tech-
nology, Nantong University, Nantong, China. His
research interests include deep learning and wireless
communications.
Shi Jin received the Ph.D. degree in informa-
tion and communications engineering from South-
east University, Nanjing, in 2007. From 2007 to
2009, he was a Research Fellow with the Adastral
Park Research Campus, University College London,
London, U.K. He is currently with the Faculty of the
National Mobile Communications Research Labo-
ratory, Southeast University. His research interests
include space time wireless communications, ran-
dom matrix theory, and information theory. He and
his co-authors received the 2011 IEEE Communica-
tions Society Stephen O. Rice Prize Paper Award in the field of communica-
tion theory and the 2010 Young Author Best Paper Award by the IEEE Signal
Processing Society. He serves as an Associate Editor of IEEE T RANSACTIONS
ON W IRELESS C OMMUNICATIONS, IEEE C OMMUNICATIONS L ETTERS , and
IET Communications.
Tony Q. S. Quek (Fellow, IEEE) received the
B.E. and M.E. degrees in electrical and electronics
engineering from the Tokyo Institute of Technology,
Tokyo, Japan, in 1998 and 2000, respectively, and
the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering and com-
puter science from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA, in 2008. He is
currently the Cheng Tsang Man Chair Professor with
the Singapore University of Technology and Design
(SUTD). He also serves as the Acting Head of ISTD
Pillar, a Sector Lead of the SUTD AI Program, and
the Deputy Director of SUTD-ZJU IDEA. His current research topics include
wireless communications and networking, network intelligence, the Internet
of Things, URLLC, and big data processing.
Dr. Quek has been actively involved in organizing and chairing sessions.
He has served as a member of the Technical Program Committee and a
symposium chairs in a number of international conferences. He is currently
serving as an Elected Member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society
SPCOM Technical Committee, the Chair of IEEE VTS Technical Committee
on Deep Learning for Wireless Communications, and an Editor for IEEE
T RANSACTIONS ON W IRELESS C OMMUNICATIONS . He was an Executive
Editorial Committee Member for IEEE T RANSACTIONS ON W IRELESS C OM -
MUNICATIONS , an Editor for IEEE T RANSACTIONS ON C OMMUNICATIONS ,
and an Editor for IEEE W IRELESS C OMMUNICATIONS L ETTERS .
He was honored with the 2008 Philip Yeo Prize for Outstanding Achieve-
ment in Research, the 2012 IEEE William R. Bennett Prize, the 2015 SUTD
Outstanding Education Awards—Excellence in Research, the 2016 IEEE
Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award, the 2017 CTTC
Early Achievement Award, the 2017 IEEE ComSoc AP Outstanding Paper
Award, and the 2016–2019 Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher. He
is a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Communications Society.