Resource Efficiency: A New Beamforming Design for Multicell Multiuser Systems

Apart from spectral efficiency (SE), energy efficiency (EE) has become an important metric for future wireless communication systems. However, how to achieve balance between SE and EE for a multicell multiuser coordinated beamforming system remains an open problem. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm for EE-SE balancing, namely, using a new metric called resource efficiency (RE) as the objective function to achieve a reasonable tradeoff between SE and EE. The considered optimization problem is more complex than traditional problems and, in general, is NP-hard for finding the globally optimal solution. To obtain insight into the problem, we first equivalently transform the original problem into a parameterized subtractive form optimization problem with some auxiliary variables by using the fraction programming theory. Then, a successive convex approximation method and the classical second-order cone programming method are jointly used to solve the equivalent problem. Finally, an effective algorithm with proven convergence is proposed to obtain the solution to the considered RE optimization. In addition, the algorithm is further extended to consider imperfect channel state information (CSI) using the worst-case design. Extensive numerical simulations are given to validate the effectiveness of our algorithm.