Joint power allocation for multi-cell distributed antenna systems with large-scale CSIT

In this paper, the problem of joint power allocation (PA) for the downlink of a multi-cell distributed antenna system (DAS) is addressed. Motivated by practical applications, we focus on a reasonable scenario that only the large-scale channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) is available. Based on the observation that the capacity-achieving input covariance for each cell is diagonal and that PA optimization is enough to achieve the maximum ergodic sum capacity, we formulate a joint PA optimization problem to maximize the ergodic sum capacity of the system with a total transmit power constraint for each cell. A rather precise closed-form approximation of the ergodic sum capacity is then introduced and taken as the objective function instead so that the original joint PA optimization problem can be simplified. Finally, we propose an iterative PA scheme based on the simplified joint PA optimization problem, in which Signomial Programming (SP) is used. Monte Carlo simulations show that the proposed scheme converges quickly and can offer nearly optimal system ergodic sum capacity. Thus, we refer the proposed PA scheme as a suboptimal one. Moreover, from the simulations we can see that a significant performance gain can be achieved by multi-cell joint PA in DAS with only large-scale CSIT.