Toward Optimal Multiuser Antenna Beamforming for Hierarchical Cognitive Radio Systems

In this paper, we present a joint antenna beamforming and power allocation technique to maximize the multiuser sum rate in an underlying microcellular system which reuses the same spectrum of a macrocellular system. One challenge in this kind of hierarchical cognitive radio (HCR) systems is to manage the interference between the macrocell and the microcell. The key contribution of this paper is to develop an optimization technique for antenna beamforming that can maximize the achievable sum rate of the underlying cognitive radio (CR) microcellular system and control the interference between the macrocell and the microcell with a satisfaction level. The proposed technique optimizes the sum rate performance by maximizing its lower bound and transfers the original non-convex problem into a convex optimization problem by introducing auxiliary variables to confine the intra-user interference power among the secondary system. Next, an iterative sum rate maximization (ISM) algorithm is developed to find the beamforming weights and the allocated power for each secondary user to simultaneously maximize system sum rate, coverage, and concurrent multiuser transmission probability in the HCR system. The developed joint design methodology provides valuable insights into the design of an optimal HCR system for various numbers of users as well as cell coverage, and can quantitatively optimize the performance tradeoffs in the hierarchical multiuser CR systems for current and future wireless communication applications.