Potentials and Limits of Using Preconfigured Spatial Beams as Bandwidth Resources: Beam Selection vs Beam Aggregation

TL;DR

This paper explores leveraging preconfigured spatial beams in legacy SDMA networks for bandwidth via NOMA, proposing beam selection and aggregation schemes that enhance throughput without spectrum or performance loss.

Contribution

It introduces two novel beam management schemes, beam selection and beam aggregation, to improve throughput in SDMA networks using NOMA without additional spectrum.

Findings

Beam selection and aggregation offer different performance-complexity tradeoffs.

Both schemes improve throughput without spectrum expansion.

Analytical and simulation results validate the proposed methods.

Abstract

This letter studies how to use spatial beams pre-configured in a legacy spatial division multiple access (SDMA) network as bandwidth resources via the implementation of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). Two different beam management schemes, namely beam selection and beam aggregation, are developed to improve the overall system throughput without consuming extra spectrum or changing the performance of the legacy network. Analytical and simulation results are presented to show that the two schemes realize different tradeoffs between system performance and complexity.