Joint transceiver beamforming design and power allocation for multiuser MIMO systems

Multi-user multiple input multiple output (MU-MIMO) system is an excellent choice for the next generation broadband communications because of its great potential in enhancing MIMO system capacity. One major challenge of such system is the jointly optimal transceiver beamforming design that maximizes the sum capacity under a total power constraint. Existing approaches have provided convex optimization solution by exploiting the duality between transmitter and receiver. However, with high computation complexity, these approaches are ineligible of practical implementation. In this paper, we aim to provide complexity efficient transceiver beamformer and power allocation design in MU-MIMO downlink (broadcast) channels. We first develop an iterative sub-optimal algorithm based on cyclic self-SINR-maximization (CSSM) beamforming design and water-filling power allocation. Comparing to convex-optimization-based (COB) approaches, the proposed solution (i.e. CSSM-WF algorithm) have insignificant sum-rate degradation but very low computational complexity and extremely fast converging speed. Trying to improve the performance of CSSM-WF algorithm, we then introduce another algorithm denoted as efficient COB (ECOB) algorithm in which CSSM-WF algorithm is used to generate a good start point for optimal COB approaches. Simulation results prove the efficiency of both proposed algorithms.