Beam Division Multiple Access (BDMA) with hybrid precoding has recently been proposed for multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems by simultaneously transmitting multiple digitally precoded users' data-streams via different beams. In contrast to most existing works that assume the number of radio frequency (RF) chains must be greater than or equal to that of data-streams, this work proposes a novel BDMA downlink system by first grouping transmitting data-streams before digitally precoding data group by group. To fully harvest the benefits of this new architecture, a greedy user grouping algorithm is devised to minimize the inter-group interference while two digital precoding approaches are developed to suppress the intra-group interference by maximizing the signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) and the signal-to-leakage-and-noise ratio (SLNR), respectively. As a result, the proposed BDMA system requires less RF chains than the total number of transmit data-streams. Furthermore, we optimize the power allocation to satisfy each user's quality of service (QoS) requirement using the D.C. (difference of convex functions) programming technique. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
Keywords: BDMA; block diagonal precoder; hybrid beamforming; power allocation.