A Learning-only Method for Multi-Cell Multi-User MIMO Sum Rate Maximization

Solving the sum rate maximization problem for interference reduction in multi-cell multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication systems has been investigated for a decade. Several machine learning-assisted methods have been proposed under conventional sum rate maximization frameworks, such as the Weighted Minimum Mean Square Error (WMMSE) framework. However, existing learning-assisted methods suffer from a deficiency in parallelization, and their performance is intrinsically bounded by WMMSE. In contrast, we propose a structural learning-only framework from the abstraction of WMMSE. Our proposed framework increases the solvability of the original MIMO sum rate maximization problem by dimension expansion via a unitary learnable parameter matrix to create an equivalent problem in a higher dimension. We then propose a structural solution updating method to solve the higher dimensional problem, utilizing neural networks to generate the learnable matrix-multiplication parameters. We show that the proposed structural learning framework achieves lower complexity than WMMSE thanks to its parallel implementation. Simulation results under practical communication network settings demonstrate that our proposed learning-only framework achieves up to 98% optimality over state-of-the-art algorithms while providing up to 47× acceleration in various scenarios. © 2024 IEEE.