Beamforming design for low-power in-band wireless backhaul systems: Centralized and distributed approaches

In this paper, we develop beamforming (BF) schemes to minimize the total transmitted power of both uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) in two-tier network with in-band wireless backhaul (WB) while the target rates of user equipment (UE) are satisfied under the backhaul constraints. We propose a centralized BF scheme with an alternate update algorithm optimizing the BF matrices and power allocation vectors. Then the UL-DL feasible target rate region of the proposed scheme is analyzed, which can be enlarged in both UL and DL by increasing the number of antennas of small cell base stations (SBSs). Simulation results show that the proposed in-band WB system for two-tier network can save the power consumption by 33.5% and 82.1% compared with the out-of-band WB system and conventional one-tier network, respectively, at the UE target rates of 80 Mb/s in DL and 40 Mb/s in UL. In addition, we propose a distributed BF scheme to locally optimize the variables at each SBS, which can achieve above 90% of the feasible target rate region of the centralized scheme without the instantaneous information exchange.