Multicell Coordinated Beamforming with Rate Outage Constraint--Part I: Complexity Analysis

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the computational complexity of coordinated beamforming in interference channels with rate outage constraints, proving that the problem is NP-hard in general, which highlights the need for approximation methods.

Contribution

The paper provides the first complexity analysis of outage constrained coordinated beamforming, establishing NP-hardness for key utility functions in multi-antenna scenarios.

Findings

Weighted sum rate outage constrained problem is NP-hard.

Weighted max-min-fairness outage constrained problem is NP-hard except for single-antenna transmitters.

Efficient approximation methods are necessary for solving these problems.

Abstract

This paper studies the coordinated beamforming (CoBF) design in the multiple-input single-output interference channel, assuming only channel distribution information given a priori at the transmitters. The CoBF design is formulated as an optimization problem that maximizes a predefined system utility, e.g., the weighted sum rate or the weighted max-min-fairness (MMF) rate, subject to constraints on the individual probability of rate outage and power budget. While the problem is non-convex and appears difficult to handle due to the intricate outage probability constraints, so far it is still unknown if this outage constrained problem is computationally tractable. To answer this, we conduct computational complexity analysis of the outage constrained CoBF problem. Specifically, we show that the outage constrained CoBF problem with the weighted sum rate utility is intrinsically difficult, i.e., NP-hard. Moreover, the outage constrained CoBF problem with the weighted MMF rate utility is also NP-hard except the case when all the transmitters are equipped with single antenna. The presented analysis results confirm that efficient approximation methods are indispensable to the outage constrained CoBF problem.