In this paper, the performance of multiple-input multiple-output non-orthogonal multiple access (MIMO-NOMA) is investigated when multiple users are grouped into a cluster. The superiority of MIMO-NOMA over MIMO orthogonal multiple access (MIMO-OMA) in terms of both sum channel capacity and ergodic sum capacity is proved analytically. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the more users are admitted to a cluster, the lower is the achieved sum rate, which illustrates the tradeoff between the sum rate and maximum number of admitted users. On this basis, a user admission scheme is proposed, which is optimal in terms of both sum rate and number of admitted users when the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio thresholds of the users are equal. When these thresholds are different, the proposed scheme still achieves good performance in balancing both criteria. Moreover, under certain conditions,it maximizes the number of admitted users. In addition, the complexity of the proposed scheme is linear to the number of users per cluster. Simulation results verify the superiority of MIMO-NOMA over MIMO-OMA in terms of both sum rate and user fairness, as well as the effectiveness of the proposed user admission scheme.
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