Spectral and Energy Efficiency Tradeoff for Massive MIMO

Achieving a good tradeoff between spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE) is important for the emerging wireless communication systems. Motivated by this, we study multiuser downlink beamforming in massive multiple-input multiple-output systems for maximizing a new metric of resource efficiency (RE), which is defined as a weighted combination of EE and SE. The new measure has more flexibility in striking the balance between SE and EE, but brings enormous difficulties in solving the resulting problem. To this end, we first investigate an uplink–downlink duality for the RE maximization. The conventional uplink–downlink duality only applies in the SE or the capacity region, and has yet not been explicitly established for the EE or the RE. In this paper, we prove with rigorous derivation that the duality has a more general form, which can be directly used to tackle the EE or RE beamforming optimization problem. Based on the duality, we then develop an optimization algorithm to realize spectral and energy efficient multiuser beamforming with either instantaneous or statistical channel state information (CSI). Numerical results finally verify that the design based on statistical CSI is able to asymptotically achieve the performance obtained with instantaneous CSI, but with much lower complexity.