One-Bit Quantized Constructive Interference Based Precoding for Massive Multiuser MIMO Downlink

We propose a one-bit symbol-level precoding method for massive multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) downlink systems using the idea of constructive interference (CI). In particular, we adopt a max-min fair design criterion which aims to maximize the minimum instantaneous received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) among the user equipments (UEs), while ensuring a CI constraint for each UE and under the restriction that the output of the precoder is a vector of binary elements. This design problem is an NP-hard binary quadratic programming due to the one-bit constraints on the elements of the precoder’s output vector, and hence, is difficult to solve. In this paper, we tackle this difficulty by reformulating the problem, in several steps, into an equivalent continuous-domain biconvex form. Our final biconvex reformulation is obtained via an exact penalty approach and can efficiently be solved using a standard block coordinate ascent algorithm. We show through simulation results that the proposed design outperforms the existing schemes in terms of (uncoded) bit error rate. It is further shown via numerical analysis that our solution algorithm is computationally-efficient as it needs only a few tens of iterations to converge in most practical scenarios.