Power Allocation Algorithms for Massive MIMO Systems with Multi-Antenna Users

Modern 5G wireless cellular networks use massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology. This concept entails using an antenna array at a base station to concurrently service many mobile devices that have several antennas on their side. In this field, a significant role is played by the precoding (beamforming) problem. During downlink, an important part of precoding is the power allocation problem that distributes power between transmitted symbols. In this paper, we consider the power allocation problem for a class of precodings that asymptotically work as regularized zero-forcing. Under some realistic assumptions, we simplify the sum spectral efficiency functional and obtain tractable expressions for it. We prove that equal power allocation provides optimum for the simplified functional with total power constraint (TPC). Also, low-complexity algorithms that improve equal power allocation in the case of per-antenna power constraints are proposed. On simulations using Quadriga, the proposed algorithms show a significant gain in sum spectral efficiency while using a similar computing time as the reference solutions.