Distributed downlink beamforming with cooperative base stations

Abstract

In this paper, we consider multicell processing on the downlink of a cellular network to accomplish "macrodiversity" transmit beamforming. The particular downlink beamformer structure we consider allows a recasting of the downlink beamforming problem as a virtual linear mean square error (LMMSE) estimation problem. We exploit the structure of the channel and develop distributed beamforming algorithms using local message passing between neighboring base stations. For 1-D networks, we use the Kalman smoothing framework to obtain a forward-backward beamforming algorithm. We also propose a limited extent version of this algorithm that shows that the delay need not grow with the size of the netwo..