Spatial-Temporal-DBSCAN-Based User Clustering and Power Allocation for Sum Rate Maximization in Millimeter-Wave NOMA Systems

The combination of millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems exploits the capability to serve multiple user devices simultaneously in one resource block. User clustering, power allocation (PA), and hybrid beamforming problems in mmWave-NOMA systems can utilize the network setting's potential to enhance the system performance. Based on similar characteristics of the spatial distributions of users in real life, we propose a novel spatial-temporal density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (ST-DBSCAN)-based unsupervised user clustering in order to enhance the system sum-rate. ST-DBSCAN is a state-of-the-art density-based clustering algorithm for solving spatial and non-spatial problems. Moreover, instead of symmetric PA, we propose an inter-cluster PA algorithm. Next, we apply boundary-compressed particle swarm optimization in order to reduce inter-cluster interference and enhance system performance. The simulation results reveal that our proposed solution improves the sum-rate of mmWave-NOMA-based systems when compared with that of mmWave-OMA-based systems. In addition, we compare our proposed algorithm with other benchmark user clustering algorithms in order to investigate the performance of our ST-DBSCAN-based user clustering algorithm. The results also illustrate that our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art user clustering algorithms in mmWave-NOMA systems.