User Grouping and Power Allocation for Downlink NOMA-Based Quadrature Spatial Modulation

Conventional non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based spatial modulation (SM) systems utilize only the real part of amplitude-phase modulation (APM) symbols for transmission, but quadrature spatial modulation (QSM) can extend this to two orthogonal components to improve the spectral efficiency. In this way, we propose a NOMA-based QSM system in multiple-input multiple-output scenarios, where APM symbols are divided into real and imaginary components for transmission and then these two components are sent by real and imaginary transmit antennas, respectively. To further improve the performance of our proposed system, we also propose a user grouping and a power allocation with relatively low complexity. Different from previous schemes, the user grouping scheme is designed for considering channel conditions, user locations, and channel correlations jointly. Moreover, the power allocation scheme is performed in each group to meet users’ quality-of-service requirements, i.e., target-rate requirements. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed schemes by comparing with existing ones.