Iterative beamforming algorithm for improved throughput in multi-cell multi-antenna wireless systems

Mitigating the effects of inter-cell interference in a multi-cell wireless network is essential to improve the achieved performance. In this study, the authors develop an iterative distributed beamforming scheme that addresses the effect of inter-cell interference problem on the downlink of a multi-cell multi-antenna wireless system with linear beamformers. The proposed scheme attempts at improving the overall system performance by exploiting network duality principle to jointly compute the optimal transmit and receive beamforming weights such that the desired received power is maximised while minimising the caused interference to other users. Network duality allows the serving base stations and the intended users to jointly compute the beamforming weights of the transmit/receive antenna elements, which improve network performance. The proposed scheme considers variable levels of channel information feedback and different transmit-receive antenna configurations. Simulation results show that a significant performance improvement is achieved through the joint optimisation of the transmit/receive beamforming vectors. Results also indicate that compared with reference schemes, their scheme improves the achieved sum-rate by up to 50%.