Decentralized Coordinated Downlink Beamforming via Primal Decomposition

This letter considers the design problem of coordinated downlink minimum power beamforming for a multiuser multi-cell network, where each multi-antenna base station (BS) serves multiple single antenna users. We propose a decentralized primal decomposition based algorithm where limited amount of information is exchanged between coupled BSs at each iteration. Algorithm converges to the globally optimal solution for a static scenario. Unlike most of the previous decentralized methods, a feasible set of beamformers is guaranteed at each iteration even when the exchanged backhaul information is outdated. Consequently, the proposed approach naturally lends itself to realistic time-correlated fading scenarios.