Optimal Multi-Antenna Transmission for the Cooperative Non-Orthogonal Multiple-Access System

We investigate the beamforming for the multi antenna cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system, where an access point (AP) delivers messages for multiple user terminals (UT) with successive interference cancellation (SIC) reception method. Some UTs with multiple antennas cooperate with the AP transmission to improve the diversity and the average power performance. We formally present two optimal beamforming schemes at the AP and at the cooperative UTs. One scheme has no power limitation for the cooperative UTs, while the other one does have such limitation. We guarantee that the rank one beamformer is sufficient to achieve the optimal points so that the proposed schemes have rank one semi-definite programming (SDP) structure. Simulation results show the performance gain of the multi-antenna cooperative NOMA schemes in the sense of diversity and the average power.