Two-Stage Beamformer Design for Massive MIMO Downlink By Trace Quotient Formulation

• Published in: IEEE transactions on communications Vol. 63; no. 6; pp. 2200 - 2211
• Main Authors: Kim, Donggun, Lee, Gilwon, Sung, Youngchul
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01-06-2015; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: adaptive weighting factor; Array signal processing; Beamforming; Channels; Covariance matrices; Downlink; Gain; Heuristic; Interference; Lower bounds; Massive MIMO systems; Mathematical models; Mercury (metals); MIMO; Optimization; Quotients; Receivers; signal-to-leakage-plus-noise ratio (SLNR); Statistics; trace quotient problem (TQP); two-stage beamforming; Massive MIMO systems; adaptive weighting factor; two-stage beamforming; signal-to-leakage-plus-noise ratio (SLNR); trace quotient problem (TQP)
• ISSN: 0090-6778; 1558-0857
• DOI: 10.1109/TCOMM.2015.2429646

In this paper, the problem of outer beamformer design based only on channel statistic information is considered for two-stage beamforming for multi-user massive MIMO downlink, and the problem is approached based on signal-to-leakage-plus-noise ratio (SLNR). To eliminate the dependence on the instantaneous channel state information, a lower bound on the average SLNR is derived by assuming zero-forcing (ZF) inner beamforming, and an outer beamformer design method that maximizes the lower bound on the average SLNR is proposed. It is shown that the proposed SLNR-based outer beamformer design problem reduces to a trace quotient problem (TQP), which is often encountered in the field of machine learning. An iterative algorithm is presented to obtain an optimal solution to the proposed TQP. The proposed method has the capability of optimally controlling the weighting factor between the signal power to the desired user and the interference leakage power to undesired users according to different channel statistics. Numerical results show that the proposed outer beamformer design method yields significant performance gain over existing methods.