Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation for NOMA HetNets in Millimeter Wave Communications

The integration of millimeter-wave (mmWave) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has attracted academic and industrial interest as a promising enabling approach due to their massive bandwidth support and greater spectral efficiency. In this paper, we consider NOMA heterogeneous network (HetNet) in mmWave communications, consisting of the macro-cell and small cell tiers connected through the wireless backhaul. Following this, we propose a user grouping algorithm to significantly simplify the user clustering process where each cluster consists of highly correlated users to suppress the inter-cluster interference. We then propose a hybrid analog/digital precoding scheme at the macro base station. The goal is to maximize the system's total energy-efficiency (EE) in NOMA HetNet by jointly optimizing the transmission of hybrid precoding, power allocation, and bandwidth partition. Next, we formulate an optimization problem within the proposed framework under the minimum data rate and total maximum transmission power constraints. Due to the non-convexity nature of the formulated problem, it is challenging to obtain the optimal solution. As a result, we transform the original problem into a quasi-convex equivalent by analyzing its structure. Then we propose energy-efficient distributed power allocation algorithms to optimize the resource allocation of macro-cell and small cells. Finally, we exhibit the simulation results to demonstrate the proposed algorithm's performance gains. The simulation results reveal that the proposed algorithmic approach surpasses state-of-the-art and traditional mmWave orthogonal multiple access systems in both capacity and EE.