Investigation of Beamforming-NOMA in mm Wave Mobile Communication Networks with Spectrum Sharing

Orthogonal Multiple Access, or OMA, schemes have been widely adopted in microwave mobile networks to reduce interference. In the sub-6GHz spectrum, current LTE and 5G systems exploit the orthogonal communication resources in terms of time, frequency or code in order to improve the Signal-to-Interference ratio, leading to fast and reliable links. However, the low spectral usage of OMA schemes make them unsuitable for use in future generation mobile networks, especially in the mmwave spectrum. The high propagation losses at mmwave frequencies and the use of M-MIMO antennas allow experimentation with new techniques that allow a highly aggressive spectrum utilization. In this paper, a beam-based Non-orthogonal Multiple Access scheme is combined with Spectrum Sharing as a potential solution for successfully meeting the requirements set for the future generation mmwave networks. Single captures of a network were ray-traced under multiple access strategies and network performance was evaluated in terms of SINR and throughput.