Multicell Multicast with Joint Beamforming and Power Allocation

This paper considers a general multicast system in which multiple cells cooperate to serve multiple multicast groups in the same radio (i.e., time-frequency) resource. To improve the quality of service (QoS) and reduce the interference among the multicast groups, joint beamforming and power allocation among the cells are employed. By exploiting the concept of downlink-uplink duality and principal angle algorithm, an iterative approach is taken to jointly design the maximum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) beamforming and power allocation under the per-cell power constraints. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a higher minimum SINR (hence the rate) for the multicast groups compared to the conventional single frequency network (SFN) based scheme and a semidefinite programming (SDP) based scheme in the literature.