Joint beamforming design and base-station assignment in a coordinated multicell system

This study is concerned with the downlink beamforming designs in a coordinated multicell system with dynamic base-station (BS) assignment. At each cell, a multiple-antenna BS employs linear beamforming to send multiple data streams to its assigned mobile-stations (MSs). Exploiting multicell coordination, the multiple BSs jointly optimise the beamformers and the BS-MS assignments to enhance the overall system performance. With per-BS power constraints, considered are the coordinated beamforming problems under the following two design criteria: (i) minimising the transmit power margin at the BS with a set of target signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratios (SINR) at the MSs and (ii) jointly maximising the minimum SINR margin at the MSs. As the original problem formulations are shown to be non-convex integer programs, which are combinatorially hard, the authors propose an efficient convex relaxation approach to solve the problems with low complexity. Simulations show that the convex relaxation-based assignment schemes significantly outperform heuristic fixed assignment schemes.