  We study physical layer multicasting in multicell networks where each base
station, equipped with multiple antennas, transmits a common message using a
single beamformer to multiple users in the same cell. We investigate two
coordinated beamforming designs: the quality-of-service (QoS) beamforming and
the max-min SINR (signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio) beamforming. The
goal of the QoS beamforming is to minimize the total power consumption while
guaranteeing that received SINR at each user is above a predetermined
threshold. We present a necessary condition for the optimization problem to be
feasible. Then, based on the decomposition theory, we propose a novel
decentralized algorithm to implement the coordinated beamforming with limited
information sharing among different base stations. The algorithm is guaranteed
to converge and in most cases it converges to the optimal solution. The max-min
SINR (MMS) beamforming is to maximize the minimum received SINR among all users
under per-base station power constraints. We show that the MMS problem and a
weighted peak-power minimization (WPPM) problem are inverse problems. Based on
this inversion relationship, we then propose an efficient algorithm to solve
the MMS problem in an approximate manner. Simulation results demonstrate
significant advantages of the proposed multicast beamforming algorithms over
conventional multicasting schemes.
