Energy Efficient Multi User Spatial Modulated NOMA for mmWave Communications

In this paper, we propose a downlink multi-user (MU) generalized spatial modulation (GSM) aided non-orthogonal multiple access (MU-GSM-NOMA) transmission technique for mmWave communications. Given a set of users, a user grouping algorithm is presented to partition the users into different clusters, and each of them is served by a dedicated uniform linear array (ULA) of antennas. The ULAs generate analog beams to steer the amplitude and phase-modulated symbols by employing the principles of NOMA. Further, the analog beams carry additional spatial information bits encoded in GSM for a particular cluster user. We propose simple digital combiners for receiver processing based on matched filtering, for which we have characterized the theoretical guarantee of the perfect detection of spatially modulated analog beams. Also, the work proposes an optimization algorithm to allocate power to the users, ensuring stable successive interference cancellation for a specific case of two users in each cluster. Finally, we present the numerical results, which demonstrate the outperformance of our proposed approach over the existing ones in terms of average sum rate and energy efficiency.