Joint tilt angle adaptation and beamforming in multicell multiuser cellular networks

3D beamforming is a promising approach for interference coordination in cellular networks which brings significant improvements in comparison with conventional 2D beamforming techniques. This paper investigates the problem of joint beamforming design and tilt angle adaptation of the BS antenna array for maximizing energy efficiency (EE) in downlink of multi-cell multi-user coordinated cellular networks. An iterative algorithm based on fractional programming approach is introduced to solve the resulting non-convex optimization problem. In each iteration, users are clustered based on their elevation angle. Then, optimization of the tilt angle is carried out through a reduced complexity greedy search to find the best tilt angle for a given placement of the users. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm achieves higher EE compared to the 2D beamforming techniques.