Joint User Scheduling, Relay Selection, and Power Allocation for Multi-Antenna Opportunistic Beamforming Systems

Opportunistic beamforming (OBF) is a potential technique in the fifth generation (5G) and beyond 5G (B5G) that can boost the performance of communication systems and encourage high user quality of service (QoS) through multi-user selection gain. However, the achievable rate tends to be saturated with the increased number of users, when the number of users is large. To further improve the achievable rate, we proposed a multi-antenna opportunistic beamforming-based relay (MOBR) system, which can achieve both multi-user and multi-relay selection gains. Then, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the achievable rate. Nevertheless, the optimization problem is a non-deterministic polynomial (NP)-hard problem, and it is difficult to obtain an optimal solution. In order to solve the proposed optimization problem, we divide it into two suboptimal issues and apply a joint iterative algorithm to consider both the suboptimal issues. Our simulation results indicate that the proposed system achieved a higher achievable rate than the conventional OBF systems and outperformed other beamforming schemes with low feedback information.

Joint Resource Allocation for Multiuser Opportunistic Beamforming Systems with OFDM-NOMA

Opportunistic beamforming (OBF) is an effective technique to improve the spectrum efficiencies (SEs) of multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems, which can obtain multiuser diversity gains with both low computation complexity and feedback information. To serve multiple users simultaneously, many multiple-access schemes have been researched in OBF. However, for most of the multiple-access schemes, the SEs are not satisfactory. To further improve the SE, this paper proposes a downlink multiuser OBF system, where both orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and non-orthogonal multiple-access (NOMA) methods are applied. The closed-form expressions of the equivalent channels and SE are derived in frequency selective fading channels. Then, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the SE, although the optimization problem is non-convex and hard to solve. To obtain the solution, we divide the optimization problem into two suboptimal issues, and then a joint iterative algorithm is applied. In the proposed optimization scheme, the subcarrier mapping ϑ, user pairing knc and allocated power Pknc are determined to maximize spectrum efficiency (SE) and reduce bit error ratio (BER). According to numerical results, the proposed method achieves approximately 5 dB gain on both SE and BER, compared to the existing beamforming methods with low feedback information. Moreover, the SE of the proposed method is approximately 2 (bps/Hz) higher than sparse code multiple-access (SCMA), when the number of waiting users and the ratio of transmit power to noise variance are respectively 10 and 20 dB. It is indicated that the proposed scheme can achieve high and low BER with the limited feedback and computation complexity, regardless of the transmit power and the number of waiting users.