Coordinated Per-Antenna Power Minimization for Multicell Massive MIMO Systems with Low-Resolution Data Converters

A multicell-coordinated beamforming solution for massive multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems is presented when employing low-resolution data converters and per-antenna level constraints. For a more realistic deployment, we aim to find the downlink (DL) beamformer that minimizes the maximum power on transmit antenna array of each basestation under received signal quality constraints while minimizing per-antenna transmit power. We show that strong duality holds between the primal DL formulation and its manageable Lagrangian dual problem which can be interpreted as the virtual uplink (UL) problem with adjustable noise covariance matrices. For a fixed set of noise covariance matrices, we claim that the virtual UL solution is effectively used to compute the DL beamformer and noise covariance matrices can be subsequently updated with an associated subgradient. Our primary contributions are then (1) formulating the quantized DL OFDM antenna power minimax problem and deriving its associated dual problem, (2) showing strong duality and interpreting the dual as a virtual quantized UL OFDM problem, and (3) developing an iterative minimax algorithm based on the dual problem. Simulations validate the proposed algorithm in terms of the maximum antenna transmit power and peak-to-average-power ratio.