Unsupervised learning based fast beamforming design for downlink MIMO

In the downlink transmission scenario, power allocation and beamforming design at the transmitter are essential when using multiple antenna arrays. This paper considers a multiple input-multiple output broadcast channel to maximize the weighted sum-rate under the total power constraint. The classical weighted minimum mean-square error (WMMSE) algorithm can obtain suboptimal solutions but involves high computational complexity. To reduce this complexity, we propose a fast beamforming design method using unsupervised learning, which trains the deep neural network (DNN) offline and provides real-time service online only with simple neural network operations. The training process is based on an end-to-end method without labeled samples avoiding the complicated process of obtaining labels. Moreover, we use the ’APoZ’-based pruning algorithm to compress the network volume, which further reduces the computational complexity and volume of the DNN, making it more suitable for low computation-capacity devices. Finally, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method improves computational speed significantly with performance close to the WMMSE algorithm.