Energy Efficient Coordinated Beamforming in Multiple Cells with Quantized Massive MIMO

Multi-cell massive MIMO is a key technology in the future communication due to its ability to compensate the fading of high-frequency channels. However, the extensive use of antennas causes higher power consumption. In general, base stations (BS) prefer low-resolution analog-to-digitalldigital-to-analog converters (ADC/DAC) to reduce power consumption, which also leads to the quantization effects. In this work, we propose a coordinated beamforming method to maximize energy efficiency (EE) in multi-cell communication systems with the impact of quantization effects on user signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). Through fractional programming (FP) and convex optimization approximation, the non-convex EE maximization problem is transformed into a convex problem ultimately. Simulation results demonstrate that the system reaches an optimum EE by adjusting the number of antennas. Furthermore, appropriately deploying the number of users and cells can simultaneously improve network capacity and EE.