Performance Evaluation of Massive MIMO with Beamforming and Non Orthogonal Multiple Access based on Practical Channel Measurements

Eric Pierre Simon (1, 2) , Joumana Farah (3) , Pierre Laly (2)

1 TELICE - IEMN - Télécommunication, Interférences et Compatibilité Electromagnétique - IEMN
2 IEMN - Institut d’Électronique, de Microélectronique et de Nanotechnologie - UMR 8520
3 Holy-Spirit University of Kaslik [Jounieh]

This paper presents a comprehensive performance analysis of a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system using non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in both indoor and outdoor environments, based on practical channel measurements. The latter are performed using frequency-domain channel sounding experiments conducted at 3.5 GHz with 18 MHz bandwidth. Multiuser beamforming and NOMA clustering are used in the massive MIMO system. The system performance is evaluated in terms of sum-rate capacity for two precoding schemes: zero-forcing (ZF) and maximum ratio transmission (MRT). Two inter-beam power allocation (PA) schemes are investigated: equal PA and water filling. Fractional transmit PA (FTPA) is used to perform intra-cluster PA between paired users. The study allows the identification of practical scenarios that are propitious to NOMA with beamforming. Results show that NOMA is particularly interesting with MRT, compared to ZF, especially when combined with water filling. However, ZF generally outperforms MRT for all system configurations.

Mots clés: Massive MIMO; NOMA; Zero-Forcing Beam- forming; Maximum Ratio Transmission Beamforming; Power Allocation; Channel sounding

Domaines: Sciences de l'ingénieur [physics]

Eric Pierre Simon, Joumana Farah, Pierre Laly. Performance Evaluation of Massive MIMO with Beamforming and Non Orthogonal Multiple Access based on Practical Channel Measurements. IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters, 2019, 18 (6), pp.1263-1267. ⟨10.1109/LAWP.2019.2914300⟩. ⟨hal-02165129⟩