Delay-aware downlink beamforming with discrete rate adaptation for green cloud radio access network

With the popularity of variety delay-sensitive services, how to guarantee the delay requirements for mobile users (MUs) is a great challenge for downlink beamformer design in green cloud radio access networks (C-RANs). In this paper, we consider the problem of the delay-aware downlink beamforming with discrete rate adaptation to minimize the power consumption of C-RANs. We address the problem via a mixed integer nonlinear program (MINLP), and then reformulate the MINLP problem as a mixed integer second-order cone program (MI-SOCP), which is a convex program when the integer variables are relaxed as continuous ones. Based on this formulation, a deflation algorithm, whose computational complexity is polynomial, is proposed to derive the suboptimal solution. The simulation results are presented to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm.