Dr Liang Liu and his collaborators in the Chinese Academy of Sciences won the Best Student Paper Award in the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) for their paper “Efficiently and Globally Solving Joint Beamforming and Compression Problem in the Cooperative Cellular Network Via Lagrangian Duality". ICASSP is the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s flagship conference on signal processing and its applications. Dr Liu’s research team considers the joint beamforming and quantization problem in the cooperative cellular network, where multiple relay-like base stations connected to the central processor via rate-limited fronthaul links cooperatively serve the users. In this paper, they first show that there is no duality gap between the considered problem and its Lagrangian dual by showing the tightness of the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) of the considered problem. Then they propose an efficient algorithm based on Lagrangian duality for solving the considered problem. The proposed algorithm is highly efficient and is guaranteed to find the global solution of the problem.
