Coordinated port selection and beam steering optimization in a multi-cell distributed antenna system using semidefinite relaxation

Abstract—In this paper, we consider coordinated downlink transmission in a cellular system wherein each base station (BS) has multiple geographically dispersed antenna ports. Each port uses a fixed transmit power and the goal of the BSs is to collectively determine the subset of ports and the corresponding beam steering coefficients that maximize the minimum signalto-interference-plus-noise ratio observed by the user terminals. This problem is NP-hard. To circumvent this difficulty, a twostage polynomial-complexity technique that relies on semidefinite relaxation and Gaussian randomization is developed. It is shown that, for the considered scenarios, the port state vectors and beam steering coefficients generated by the proposed technique yield a performance comparable to that yielded by exhaustive search, but with a significantly less computational complexity. It is also shown that the proposed technique results in significant power savings when compared with other transmission strategies proposed in the literature. Index Terms—Distributed antenna systems, remote radio heads, multi-cell coordination, port selection, beam steering optimization, semidefinite relaxation, Gaussian randomization. I