Fairness-Aware Hybrid Precoding for mmWave NOMA Unicast/Multicast Transmissions in Industrial IoT

Abstract: This paper investigates dual-layer non-orthogonally superimposed transmissions for industrial internet of things (IoT) millimeter-wave communications. Essentially, the overlayer is a ubiquitous multicast signal devised to serve all the devices in coverage with a common message, i.e., critical control packet. The underlayer is a composite signal that consists of private unicast messages. Due to safety implications, it is critical that all devices can decode the multicast information. To ensure this requirement, we jointly optimize the hybrid precoder, analog combiners, power allocation, and fairness. Specifically, we incorporate a power splitting constraint between the two overlaid signals and enforce supplementary per-device constraints to guarantee multicast fairness. Performance is evaluated in terms of the spectral efficiency, multicast fairness, and bit error rate, thus corroborating the feasibility of our proposed scheme.