Minimum Power Multicast Beamforming With Superposition Coding for Multiresolution Broadcast and Application to NOMA Systems

Multicast beamforming with superposition coding (SC) is studied for multiresolution broadcast where both data streams of high priority (HP) and low priority (LP) are to be transmitted for a user close to a base station (BS), while only data stream of LP is to be transmitted to a user not close to the BS (e.g., a cell-edge user). Using SC, a minimum total transmission power beamforming problem has been formulated to find beamforming vectors and powers for both users. For given normalized beamforming vectors, a closed-form expression for the optimal power allocation is derived from which an iterative algorithm is considered to find beamforming vectors. The proposed multicast beamforming with SC is applied to nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems to support multiple users as a two-stage beamforming method.