Decentralized Minimum Power Multi-Cell Beamforming with Limited Backhaul Signaling

A decentralized solution is proposed for the coordinated multi-cell multi-antenna minimum power beamformer design problem with single-antenna users. The optimal minimum power beamformers can be obtained locally at each base station (BS) relying on limited backhaul information exchange between BSs. The original centralized problem is reformulated such that the BSs are coupled by real-valued inter-cell interference terms. The coupling is handled by taking local copies of the interference terms at each BS and enforcing consistency between them. The consistency constraints are then decoupled by a standard dual decomposition approach leading to a distributed algorithm. The proposed method is able to guarantee feasible solutions even if the interference information is outdated or incomplete. In addition, the proposed approach allows for a number of special cases, where the backhaul information exchange is reduced at the cost of somewhat sub-optimal performance. The performance of the proposed coordinated multi-cell transmission is compared with the coherent multi-cell beamforming and with inter-cell interference nulling in different scenarios with varying interference. A near-optimal performance can be achieved even with significantly reduced backhaul information exchange and with relatively high velocities and/or low backhaul signaling rates.