Coordinated Multicast Precoding for Multi-Cell Massive MIMO Transmission Exploiting Statistical Channel State Information

Abstract

This paper considers coordinated multi-cell multicast precoding for massive multiple-input-multiple-output transmission where only statistical channel state information of all user terminals (UTs) in the coordinated network is known at the base stations (BSs). We adopt the sum of the achievable ergodic multicast rate as the design objective. We first show the optimal closed-form multicast signalling directions of each BS, which simplifies the coordinated multicast precoding problem into a coordinated beam domain power allocation problem. Via invoking the minorization-maximization framework, we then propose an iterative power allocation algorithm with guaranteed convergence to a stationary point. In addition, we derive the deterministic equivalent of the design objective to further reduce the optimization complexity via invoking the large-dimensional random matrix theory. Numerical results demonstrate the performance gain of the proposed coordinated approach over the conventional uncoordinated approach, especially for cell-edge UTs.