Energy-Aware and Rate-Aware Heuristic Beamforming in Downlink MIMO OFDMA Networks With Base-Station Coordination

This paper addresses the problem of coordinated beamforming across a group of base stations (BSs) and frequency slots in the downlink of a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency-division multiple-access (OFDMA) cellular network. Three figures of merit are considered for system design under a per-BS power constraint: 1) the weighted sum of the rates (WSR) on the frequency slots of the coordinated BSs; 2) the global energy efficiency (GEE), defined as the ratio between the network sum rate and the corresponding consumed power; and 3) the weighted sum of the energy efficiencies (WSEE) on the frequency slots of the coordinated BSs. The Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions of the considered optimization problems are first derived to gain insight into the structure of the optimal beamformers. Then, we propose a suboptimal design method that can be applied to all considered figures of merit. Numerical results are provided to assess the performance of the proposed beamforming strategies.