Cooperative Multicell Downlink Joint Coordinated Switched Beamforming and User Pairing

Cellular networks encounter major challenges in terms of interference management and power consumption. To face these challenges, we present a new switched beamforming (SBF) scheme based on the combination of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and space division multiple access (SDMA) techniques. Then, we formulate a joint coordinated SBF and user pairing scheme in order to minimize the transmit power subject to the quality of service (QoS) constraints and pairing constraints in a fully cooperative multicell network. To solve the problem, we first provide an efficient method to compute the optimal beamformers for a user group. Then, we propose an algorithm to find the optimal pairing strategy and the optimal beamforming scheme for each group. Simulation results highlight the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.