Weighted Sum Rate-Based Coordinated Beamforming in Multi-Cell Multicast Networks

In this letter, we investigate the coordinated beamforming design with the goal of maximizing the weighted sum rate in multi-cell multicast networks. This problem is NP-hard, since the multicast rate maximization problem in single-cell networks is NP-hard. We propose a low-complexity, provably convergent iterative algorithm, where in each iteration, the original problem can be expressed as a second-order cone programming (SOCP) by using convex approximation. Simulation results show that the proposed iterative SOCP algorithm yields a better performance gain than existing algorithms.