Tight Probabilistic SINR Constrained Beamforming Under Channel Uncertainties

In downlink multi-user beamforming, a single basestation is serving a number of users simultaneously. However, energy intended for one user may leak to other unintended users, causing interference. With signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) being one of the most crucial quality metrics to users, beamforming design with SINR guarantee has always been an important research topic. However, when the channel state information is not accurate, the SINR requirements become probabilistic constraints, which unfortunately are not tractable analytically for general uncertainty distribution. Therefore, existing probabilistic beamforming methods focus on the relatively simple Gaussian and uniform channel uncertainties, and mainly rely on probability inequality based approximated solutions, resulting in conservative SINR outage realizations. In this paper, based on the local structure of the feasible set in the probabilistic beamforming problem, a systematic method is proposed to realize tight SINR outage control for a large class of channel uncertainty distributions. With channel estimation and quantization errors as examples, simulation results show that the SINR outage can be realized tightly, which results in reduced transmit power compared to the existing inequality based probabilistic beamformers.