Coordinated beamforming for the multi-cell multi-antenna wireless system

In a conventional wireless cellular system, signal processing is performed on a per-cell basis; out-of-cell interference is treated as background noise. This paper considers the benefit of coordinating base-stations across multiple cells in a multi-antenna beamforming system, where multiple base-stations may jointly optimize their respective beamformers to improve the overall system performance. This paper focuses on a downlink scenario where each remote user is equipped with a single antenna, but where multiple remote users may be active simultaneously in each cell. The design criterion is the minimization of the total weighted transmitted power across the base-stations subject to signal-to-interference-and-noise-ratio (SINR) constraints at the remote users. The main contribution is a practical algorithm that is capable of finding the joint optimal beamformers for all base-stations globally and efficiently. The proposed algorithm is based on a generalization of uplink-downlink duality to the multi-cell setting using the Lagrangian duality theory. The algorithm also naturally leads to a distributed implementation. Simulation results show that a coordinated beamforming system can significantly outperform a conventional system with per-cell signal processing.