Multicast Beamforming Design in Multicell Networks With Successive Group Decoding

Abstract

We consider a generic problem of multicast beamforming design in multicell networks where each base station (BS) has multiple independent messages to multicast and each user intends to decode an arbitrary subset of messages sent from all BSs using successive group decoding (SGD). We first formulate the total transmit power minimization problem subject to the constraints that a target rate vector is achievable by the SGDs at all receivers. This problem is a non-convex quadratically constrained quadratic program and NP-hard. We propose a new method based on solving a sequence of linearly regularized semi-definite programming (SDP) relaxation of the original problem that yields feasible and near-optimal solutions with high probability. Moreover, we propose a decentralized algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers to solve each linearly regularized SDP, which consists of solving a quadratic program at the central controller, and closed-form analytic computations at each BS. Finally, we propose an iterative procedure for joint beamformer and rate optimization under the SGD framework. Numerical results confirm the superiority of the proposed beamformer design in both performance and complexity. It is also demonstrated that, compared with the traditional linear receivers, the SGD receivers achieve both significant rate improvement and energy savings.