ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION IN IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING 1 Robust QoS-Constrained Optimization of Downlink Multiuser MISO Systems

Abstract—The knowledge of the channel at the transmit side of a communication system can be exploited by using precoding techniques, from which the overall transmission quality might benefit significantly. However, in practical wireless systems, the channel state information is prone to errors, which sometimes deteriorates the performance drastically. In this paper, we address the problem of robust transceiver design in a downlink multiuser system, with respect to the erroneous channel knowledge at the transmitter. The base station is equipped with an antenna array, while users have single antennas. The transceiver optimization is performed under a set of predefined users ’ quality-of-service constraints, defined as maximum mean square errors, or minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratios, which must be satisfied for all disturbances that belong to given, bounded uncertainty sets. Efficient numerical solutions are obtained using semidefinite programming methods from convex optimization theory. The proposed algorithms are found to outperform related approaches in the literature in terms of the achieved performance, while maintaining low computational complexity. The studied uncertainty models are applicable in mitigating typical errors that emerge as a result of quantization or channel estimation. Index Terms—Multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) systems, joint transmit-receive equalization, robustness, semidefinite programming, ellipsoid method. I