Potentials and Limits of Using Preconfigured Spatial Beams as Bandwidth Resources: Beam Selection Versus Beam Aggregation

This letter studies how to use spatial beams preconfigured in a legacy spatial division multiple access (SDMA) network as bandwidth resources via the implementation of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). Two different beam management schemes, namely beam selection and beam aggregation, are developed to improve the overall system throughput without consuming extra spectrum or changing the performance of the legacy network. Analytical and simulation results are presented to show that the two schemes realize different tradeoffs between system performance and complexity.