10
1, JANUARY 2009
Hybrid Zero-Forcing Beamforming/Orthogonal Beamforming with
User Selection for MIMO Broadcast Channels
Caihua Zhang, Wei Xu, Student Member, IEEE, and Ming Chen, Member, IEEE
Abstract—This letter proposes a hybrid transmission scheme
by combining zero-forcing beamforming (ZFBF) and orthogo-
nal beamforming (OBF) for the multiple-input multiple-output
broadcast channel. This method first utilizes ZFBF for only a part
of the scheduled users with approximately orthogonal channels.
By further constructing orthogonal beamformers in the null
space of the ZFBF user channels, it then employs OBF for the
rest of users to fully exploit the spatial dimension. Theoretical
analysis, as well as simulation results, verify that our scheme
outperforms the conventional ZFBF scheme and OBF scheme
with user selection.
Index Terms—Broadcast channel, multiple-input multiple-
output, zero-forcing beamforming, orthogonal beamforming.
I. I NTRODUCTION
R ECENTLY, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)
broadcast systems have attracted significant attention as
they provide both spatial multiplexing gain and multi-user
diversity gain [1]. Dirty paper coding (DPC) is a capacity-
achieving scheme for the MIMO broadcast channel (BC) [2].
For practical applications, however, DPC is difficult to imple-
ment due to its high complexity. Therefore, linear beamform-
ing is investigated as an alternative [3]–[9]. In particular, [3]
proposes an iterative algorithm to find the optimal beamform-
ers that maximize the sum rate (RMBF). Due to the iterative
nature, RMBF is still of high complexity. Hence, a series of
more efficient beamforming strategies, including zero-forcing
beamforming (ZFBF) [4]–[6], orthogonal beamforming (OBF)
[7], [8], and orthogonal random beamforming (ORBF) [9], are
developed.
When there are many users in the system, user selection is
an essential technique. It selects a subset of users for simul-
taneous transmission. In [5], [6], two efficient user selection
methods, namely semi-orthogonal user selection (SUS) and
greedy user selection (GUS), are proposed for MIMO BCs
with ZFBF, respectively. Works in [5] show that ZFBF with
SUS (ZFBF-SUS) is able to achieve the optimal sum rate
asymptotically when the number of users approaches infinity.
However, for systems with low to moderate numbers of users,
its performance degrades, especially in the low SNR regime
[5], [7]. To improve the performance in this case, OBF is
Manuscript received September 12, 2008. The associate editor coordinating
the review of this letter and approving it for publication was F. Granelli.
This work was supported by the National 863 High Technology Development
Project (No. 2007AA01Z207 and No. 2007AA01Z268), Program for New
Century Excellent Talents in University, and Research Fund of National
Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University (No.
2008A06).
The authors are with the National Mobile Communications Research
Laboratory, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China (e-mail: {caihuaz,
weiwell hsu, chenming}@seu.edu.cn).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LCOMM.2009.081466
1089-7798/09$25.00 
IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 13, NO.
introduced in [7] and later modified in [8]. Generally, it is
known that, for systems with low to moderate number of users,
OBF outperforms ZFBF at low SNR whereas ZFBF performs
better when SNR becomes large [8].
This letter proposes a hybrid ZFBF/OBF (referred to as
HBF) scheme to achieve promising performance in various
scenarios. The essential idea behind our HBF scheme is
to dynamically choose ZFBF or OBF for designing the
beamformers of the scheduled users. The HBF scheme first
exploits ZFBF for only a part of the scheduled users with
near-orthogonal channels. Then, to fully exploit the spatial
dimension, it selects several more users and assigns them
orthogonal beamformers which are chosen in the null space
of the ZFBF user channels. The optimal HBF scheme selects
users and their beamforming strategies by exhaustive search.
To reduce the complexity, we further propose an efficient sub-
optimal scheme based on greedy search.
Notation: We use uppercase and lowercase boldface letters
to denote matrices and vectors, respectively. A† denotes the
conjugate transpose of matrix A. [A]i,j denotes the (i, j)th
element of matrix A. x denotes the Euclidean norm of
vector x. IM is the M × M identity matrix. |A| is the
cardinality of set A.
II. S YSTEM M ODEL
Consider a MIMO BC with an M -antenna base station
(BS) and K (K ≥ M ) single-antenna users. Denote the
flat fading channel of user k as hk ∈ C1×M . Its entries
are independent and identically complex Gaussian distributed
with zero mean and unit variance. Assume that perfect chan-
nel state information of all users is known at the BS. Let
A = {k1 , · · · , kM } ⊆ {1, · · · , K} be the set of scheduled
users. The received signal at user k ∈ A is
  
yk = Pk hk wk sk + hk Pj wj sj + nk (1)
j∈A,j=k
where Pk is the transmit power for user k, wk ∈ CM×1 is the
corresponding unit-norm beamformer, sk is the normalized
data symbol, and nk is the complex Gaussian noise with
zero
mean and unit variance. The transmit power constraint
is k∈A Pk = P . For simplicity, equal power allocation
P
is assumed, i.e. Pk = M , ∀k ∈ A. Thus, the signal-to-
interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of user k is
P 2
M |hk wk |
SINRk = P
 2 . (2)
M j∈A,j=k |hk wj | + 1
Given A, the sum rate of our system is calculated as

R (A) = log2 (1 + SINRk ) . (3)
k∈A
c 2009 IEEE
ZHANG et al.: HYBRID ZERO-FORCING BEAMFORMING/ORTHOGONAL BEAMFORMING WITH USER SELECTION FOR MIMO BROADCAST CHANNELS 11

The objective of our work is to select M users (A) for
transmission and design their beamformers (wk , k ∈ A) so
as to maximize the sum rate [R (A)].
III. H YBRID ZFBF/OBF S CHEME
As mentioned earlier, ZFBF and OBF are two commonly
used beamforming strategies, each of which has its own
advantage. ZFBF performs quite well for a large user system,
but suffers performance degradation for systems with low to
moderate number of users, especially at low SNR [5], [7].
OBF overcomes the drawback of ZFBF while sacrificing the
performance for a large user system or under high SNR [8].
Therefore, this study presents a HBF scheme which provides
satisfactory performance in various scenarios.
The essential idea behind our HBF scheme is to combine
ZFBF and OBF for designing the beamformers of the sched-
uled users. The proposed scheme first exploits ZFBF only for
users with near-orthogonal channels. The number of these
users, denoted as L, may be less than M , the maximum
number of users allowed for simultaneous transmission. Sub-
sequently, it selects (M − L) additional users to fully exploit
the spatial dimension, and assigns orthogonal beamformers to
them. It is important to note that these orthogonal beamform-
ers are chosen in the null space of the ZFBF user channels
in order to introduce no inter-user interference to users using
ZFBF.
Mathematically, given the set of scheduled users A, we
assume the first L (1 ≤ L ≤ M ) users employ ZFBF
 †
and others use OBF. Let H (L, A) = h†k1 , · · · , h†kL be
the concatenated channel vectors of the first L users. The
beamforming vectors for them are
wki = qi /qi , i = 1, · · · , L
where qi is the ith column of
 −1
†
F (L, A) = H (L, A) H (L, A) H (L, A)
†
. (5)
Subsequently for users ki (L + 1 ≤ i ≤ M ), their beamform-
ers, which are chosen in the null space of the subspace spanned
by h†k1 , · · · , h†kL , wkL+1 , · · · , wki−1 , can be given by
wki = gi /gi , i = L + 1, · · · , M
where
⎛ ⎞
L
 h†kj hkj i−1
 end for
gi = ⎝IM − − wkj wk† j ⎠ h†ki .
j=1
hkj 2
j=L+1
When i = L + 1, this implies gi = plexity of Algorithm 1. For each n ≤ M , Algorithm 1 evalu-
 
L h†kj hkj † ates (K −n+1) rates RZFBF (S ∪ {l}) and (K −n+1) SINRs
IM − j=1 hk 2 hki . Substituting (4) and (6) into (2),
j
Accordingly, we can calculate the sum rate of HBF with
respect to L and A by
M

RHBF (L, A) = log2 (1 + SINRki ) . (9)
i=1
Therefore, the achievable sum rate of HBF can be maximized
by considering every possible choice of L and A
RHBF = max RHBF (L, A) . (10)
1≤L≤M,A⊆{1,··· ,K}:|A|=M
Finding the optimal solution to problem (10) requires
exhaustive search, which is computationally prohibitive for
large K. To reduce the complexity, we propose an efficient
sub-optimal scheme. In the scheme, we iteratively select a
user from the unselected users and determine its beamforming
strategy by maximizing the sum rate together with the already
selected users. Note that the first user is selected with the
largest channel magnitude and its beamforming strategy may
be set as either ZFBF or OBF. To further simplify the scheme,
we set the beamforming strategy of the first user as ZFBF
and introduce the following constraint: once the beamforming
strategy of a user is selected as OBF, then for the subsequently
selected users, their beamforming strategies will always be
OBF. The details of our proposed scheme are described in
Algorithm 1. It returns S as the set of scheduled users. In the
algorithm, RZFBF (A) denotes the sum rate of ZFBF for a given
set A, and BF indicator indicates the beamforming strategy
of the newly selected user such that BF indicator = 0
represents ZFBF and BF indicator = 1 means OBF.
Algorithm 1 HBF with User Selection
Initialization: B = {1, · · · , K}, S = ∅, and L = M
r1 = arg maxl∈B hl h†l , BF indicator = 0, S = S∪{r1 }
for n = 2 to M do
(4)
if BF indicator = 0 then
rZF = arg maxl∈B\S RZFBF (S ∪ {l})
rOBF = arg maxl∈B\S RHBF (n − 1, S ∪ {l}) 1
if RZFBF (S ∪ {rZF }) > RHBF (n − 1, S ∪ {rOBF })
then
rn = rZF
else
rn = rOBF , BF indicator = 1, L = n − 1
end if
else
(6)
rn = arg maxl∈B\S RHBF (L, S ∪ {l})
end if
S = S ∪ {rn }
(7)
Subsequently, we briefly discuss the computational com-
in the worst case. From [6], we know that the evaluation of

we obtain the SINR of the scheduled users as each RZFBF (S ∪ {l}) has complexity O(M 2 ). Moreover, from
⎧ (8), we can easily see that the evaluation of each SINR also
⎨ M (H(L,A)H(L,A)† )−1  , 1 ≤ i ≤ L
P
⎪
1 Note that in HBF, a selected OBF user does not cause any interference
SINRki = gi 2
i,i

⎪
⎩ i−1 |h w |2 +M/P , L + 1 ≤ i ≤ M. to the previously selected users. Thus, instead of selecting the user with the
j=1
ki kj largest sum rate, we can choose the user with the largest SINR to reduce the
(8) complexity.
12
Fig. 1. Sum rate versus the number of users K for M = 8, P = 5 dB.
Fig. 2. Sum rate versus average SNR P for M = 8, K = 50.
has complexity O(M 2 ). Thus, the complexity of Algorithm 1
is O(M 3 K), while the complexity of the GUS algorithm for
ZFBF is also O(M 3 K) [6].
Finally, we compare the maximum achievable sum rate of
HBF with that of ZFBF and OBF in a theoretical way. For
the sake of comparison, the maximum achievable sum rate of
ZFBF and OBF are formulated by
RZFBF = max RZFBF (A) (11)
A⊆{1,··· ,K}:|A|=M
ROBF = max ROBF (A) (12)
A⊆{1,··· ,K}:|A|=M
where ROBF (A) represents the sum rate of OBF for a given
set A. The following theorem shows that HBF outperforms
ZFBF and OBF, all with optimal user scheduling.
Theorem 1: The maximum achievable sum rate of HBF
is larger than that of ZFBF and OBF, i.e., RHBF ≥
max {RZFBF , ROBF }.
Proof: Note that for a given user set A with |A| = M ,
HBF reduces to OBF when L = 1 and to ZFBF when
L = M . Hence, we have RHBF (1, A) = ROBF (A) and
RHBF (M, A) = RZFBF (A). Obviously, the maximum achiev-
able sum rate of HBF for a given set A can be lower bounded
as max1≤L≤M RHBF (L, A) ≥ max {RZFBF (A) , ROBF (A)}.
By considering every possible choice of A, we conclude that
RHBF ≥ max {RZFBF , ROBF }.
IV. S IMULATION R ESULTS
In this section, we compare the performance of our HBF
scheme in Algorithm 1 (HBF-US) with the following schemes:
IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 13, NO. 1, JANUARY 2009
ZFBF-SUS [5], ZFBF-GUS [6], OBF-GUS [8], and ORBF [9].
For all the above schemes, we assume equal power allocation
over the selected users. For reference, we also include the
performance of RMBF [3] with GUS (RMBF-GUS).
Fig. 1 shows the sum rate versus the number of users K
for M = 8, P = 5 dB. We can see that HBF-US outperforms
all the other schemes except for RMBF-GUS in all ranges
of K. Moreover, for growing K, the sum rate of HBF-US
approaches that of ZFBF-GUS. This is due to the fact that the
transmitter can always select M users with semi-orthogonal
channels when the number of users is sufficiently large. In
this case, HBF-US reduces to ZFBF-GUS. Although there is a
noticeable gap between HBF-US and RMBF-GUS, we should
mention that HBF-US has similar complexity to ZFBF-GUS,
which is much simpler than RMBF-GUS.
In Fig. 2, the sum rate versus average SNR P for M =
8, K = 50 is given. It can be observed that HBF-US achieves
higher sum rate than all the other schemes except RMBF-GUS
in all ranges of P . It can also be seen that HBF-US achieves
almost the same sum rate as ZFBF-GUS at high SNR and
similar sum rate to OBF-GUS at low SNR. The reason is that
eliminating the inter-user interference is of crucial importance
at high SNR and is not necessary at low SNR. As a result, in
HBF-US, all the selected users employ ZFBF as P → ∞ and
use OBF as P → 0.
V. C ONCLUSIONS
In this letter, we propose a hybrid transmission scheme for
the MIMO BC aiming to achieve satisfactory performance
in various scenarios. Both theoretic analysis and simulation
results show that the proposed HBF scheme outperforms the
conventional ZFBF scheme and OBF scheme in all ranges of
SNR and the number of users.
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