Downlink power control for massive MIMO cellular systems with optimal user association

This paper aims to minimize the total transmit power consumption for Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) downlink cellular systems when each user is served by the optimized subset of the base stations (BSs). We derive a lower bound on the ergodic spectral efficiency (SE) for Rayleigh fading channels and maximum ratio transmission (MRT) when the BSs cooperate using non-coherent joint transmission. We solve the joint user association and downlink transmit power minimization problem optimally under fixed SE constraints. Furthermore, we solve a max-min fairness problem with user specific weights that maximizes the worst SE among the users. The optimal BS-user association rule is derived, which is different from maximum signal-to-noise-ratio (max-SNR) association. Simulation results manifest that the proposed methods can provide good SE for the users using less transmit power than in small-scale systems and that the optimal user association can effectively balance the load between BSs when needed.