Efficient transceiver beamforming in multiple‐input–multiple‐output cognitive radio network

Owing to the ability of improving spectrum utilisation and quality‐of‐service (QoS) in wireless communications, multiple‐input–multiple‐output (MIMO) cognitive radio (CR) network has been identified as an excellent choice for the next generation communication. To protect primary users (PUs) from excessive interference while ensuring a meaningful QoS of secondary users (SUs), one key challenge of such system is the joint design of transceiver beamforming for SUs. In this study, the authors investigate the beamforming in MIMO CR network, and two optimisation problems in terms of the minimisation of the total transmission power and the maximisation of the smallest received signal‐to‐interference‐plus‐noise ratio (SINR) are considered. The problems can be formulated as indefinite quadratic optimisation programs which are known to be non‐convex NP‐hard. Hence, a distributed algorithm based on semi‐definite programming and minimum‐mean‐squared‐error is proposed to achieve the optimal beamforming weight vector. The findings of this study demonstrated that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing ones with respect to the total transmitted power and SUs SINR.