Joint Beamforming and Power Allocation for Satellite-Terrestrial Integrated Networks With Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a joint optimization design for a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based satellite-terrestrial integrated network (STIN), where a satellite multicast communication network shares the millimeter wave spectrum with a cellular network employing NOMA technology. By assuming that the satellite uses multibeam antenna array and the base station employs uniform planar array, we first formulate a constrained optimization problem to maximize the sum rate of the STIN while satisfying the constraint of per-antenna transmit power and quality-of-service requirements of both satellite and cellular users. Since the formulated optimization problem is NP-hard and mathematically intractable, we develop a novel user pairing scheme so that more than two users can be grouped in a cluster to exploit the NOMA technique. Based on the user clustering, we further propose to transform the non-convex problem into an equivalent convex one, and present an iterative penalty function-based beamforming (BF) scheme to obtain the BF weight vectors and power coefficients with fast convergence. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach in comparison with the existing works.