Pricing-Based Distributed Beamforming for Dynamic Time Division Duplexing Systems

Multicell dynamic time division duplexing (TDD) systems make it possible to adapt the number of uplink and downlink time slots in each cell to the prevailing cell-wide traffic demand. Although dynamic TDD systems can be advantageously deployed in scenarios in which the uplink and downlink traffic demands are asymmetric and time varying, dynamic TDD systems give rise to base station to base station (BS-to-BS) interference and user equipment to user equipment (UE-to-UE) interference that negatively impact the system performance. In this paper, we propose employing a distributed beamforming scheme to mitigate the BS-to-BS interference and thereby to improve the uplink performance. Specifically, the proposed scheme uses interference pricing to find the appropriate precoder vectors at the BSs, which also improves the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) performance in the downlink. We compare the performance of the pricing-based (PB) beamforming scheme with that of zero-forcing beamforming in an outdoor picocell environment specified by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project using a realistic system simulator. We find that the proposed PB scheme boosts the SINR in the uplink at the expense of a small degradation of the downlink SINR compared with the zero-forcing scheme. On the other hand, the PB beamforming approach can significantly reduce the downlink transmit power levels and thereby improve the overall energy efficiency of the system.