A Performance Analysis of ADMM Applied to Coordinated Beamforming

This paper presents a performance analysis for a centralized solution to the Coordinated Beamforming Optimization Problem (CBOP), that uses an Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) approach in order to speed up calculations and to provide certificates of infeasibility. The ADMM algorithm is said to solve large-scale problems with modest accuracy, within a reasonably low amount of time, and to allow calculation in a parallel fashion, which would be very desirable for C-RAN networks. In this paper, the ADMM approach is applied to a coordinated beamforming scenario, but differently from other works, without considering joint transmission. The performance of the ADMM solution is analyzed by comparing its simulation results with a well known approach that uses a Semidefinite Programming (SDP) embedding based on semidefinite relaxation. It is shown that the ADMM approach requires significantly less time to solve large-scale problems when modest accuracy is required.