Transmit beamforming with cooperative base stations

Abstract

We consider a cellular network where base stations can cooperate to determine the signals to be transmitted on the downlink. In such a scenario, it would be possible to use "macroscopic" transmit beamforming to improve system performance. The downlink beamformer of interest is generalised from some transmit beamformers that have been shown to meet various optimality criteria in the literature. The particular down-link beamformer structure enables us to recast our downlink beamforming problem as a virtual LMMSE estimation problem. Based on this virtual set up, we exploit the structure of the channel and develop distributed beamforming algorithms using local message passing between neighbouring base stations. Two algorithms are outlined, both of which are based on the Kalman smoothing framework. The first algorithm is a forward-backward algorithm that produces optimal performance, but it has the disadvantage of a delay that grows linearly with array size. The second algorithm, which is a limited extent algorithm, solves the delay problem by using only local information.