MUBFP: Multi-User Beamforming and Partitioning for Sum Capacity Maximization in MIMO Systems

Abstract

The multiuser beamforming (MUBF) scheme has attracted tremendous attention as a suboptimal linear precoding technique to realize the benefits of system capacity in multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Due to mutual interference between cochannel users, the objective of maximizing the system capacity and fair service provisioning to different users should be well balanced in the design of the MUBF scheme. To this end, we propose a framework for the joint multiuser beamforming and partitioning (MUBFP) design problem, which attempts to partition users into a set of disjoint groups, where each group of users is served using the MUBF scheme. By jointly optimizing the grouping number, the user partitioning, and the beamformer design, the average sum capacity can be maximized without sacrificing user fairness. A decomposition approach is presented to decouple this problem into the user partitioning and beamformer design subproblems with the given number of groups, which can be solved using the agglomerative hierarchical clustering (AHC) algorithm and sequential parametric convex approximation (SPCA) approach, respectively. An iterative algorithm is proposed to search the optimal grouping number for the decoupled MUBFP problem by incorporating the algorithms of these two subproblems, and a suboptimal algorithm is developed to reduce the searching times with good approximation performance. Simulation results are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed schemes in terms of convergence, average sum capacity, and complexity.