Joint Multiuser Downlink Beamforming and Admission Control: A Semidefinite Relaxation Approach

Multiuser downlink beamforming under quality of service (QoS) constraints has attracted considerable interest in recent years, because it is particularly appealing from a network operator's perspective (e.g., UMTS, 802.16e). When there are many co-channel users and/or the service constraints are stringent, the problem becomes infeasible and some form of admission control is necessary. We advocate a cross-layer approach to joint multiuser transmit beamforming and admission control, aiming to maximize the number of users that can be served at their desired QoS. The core problem is NP-hard, yet amenable to convex approximation tools. We propose a computationally efficient semidefinite relaxation algorithm which works remarkably well in a range of experiments, using both simulated and measured channel data.