Weighted sum rate optimization for multicell MIMO systems with hardware-impaired transceivers

Physical transceivers exhibit distortions from hardware impairments, of which traces remain even after compensation and calibration. Multicell MIMO coordinated beamforming methods that ignore these residual impairments may suffer from severely degraded performance. In this work, we consider a general model for the aggregate effect of the residual hardware impairments, and propose an iterative algorithm for finding locally optimal points to a weighted sum rate optimization problem. The importance of accounting for the residual hardware impairments is verified by numerical simulation, and a substantial gain over traditional time-division multiple access with impairments-aware resource allocation is observed.