Impact of Beam Misalignment on Hybrid Beamforming NOMA for mmWave Communications

Abstract: This paper studies hybrid beamforming (HB)-based non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in multiuser millimeter wave (mmWave) communications. HB offers power-efficient and low-complexity precoding for downlink multiuser mmWave systems which increases multiplexing gain and spectral efficiency of the system. Applying NOMA to HB-based systems, called HB-NOMA, can scale the number of users while offering a high spectral efficiency. However, an imperfect correlation between the effective channels of users in each NOMA cluster seriously degrades the achievable rate of HB-NOMA. In this paper, first a sum-rate maximization problem is formulated for HB-NOMA, and an algorithm is proposed to solve it effectively. It is then shown that the relationship between the effective channels of the users in each NOMA cluster can be approximated by a correlation factor. Next, the effect of imperfect correlation is analyzed, and a lower bound on the achievable rate of the users is derived for both perfect and imperfect correlation. Finally, the rate gap resulting from an imperfect correlation is evaluated and a tight upper bound is derived for that. Simulation results show that low correlation degrades the achievable rate of users. The lower bounds are tight in the large dimensional regime and in single-path channels.