As is well known, multiuser MIMO transceiver design and optimization techniques play a significant role in enhancing system throughput and efficiency in modern communications.
This talk will describe the speaker’s fundamental endeavors on two key topics. The first topic considers physical-layer MISO multicasting, or common information broadcast to multiple users. In this context one usually adopts beamforming, optimized via a method called semidefinite relaxation (SDR). We do this rethinking: can we obtain better designs by altering the physical-layer transceiver architecture itself? We will introduce a novel transceiver strategy called stochastic beamforming (SBF)---which adopts a random-in-time beamforming strategy---that can outperform SDR-based beamforming and reveals new insights. The second topic considers robust unicast MISO beamforming under imperfect channel information. Such designs can be very challenging even from a mathematical optimization viewpoint. We will review or rediscover several popularized techniques that are established under the SDR framework. If time permits, some recent theoretical breakthrough will be described.

Wing-Kin (Ken) Ma is a Professor with the Department of Electronic Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests lie in signal processing, optimization and communications. His most recent research focuses on two distinctive topics, namely, structured matrix factorization for data science and remote sensing, and MIMO transceiver optimization. Dr. Ma is active in the Signal Processing Society. He served as editors of several journals, e.g., Senior Area Editor of IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Lead Guest Editor of a special issue in IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, to name a few. He is currently a member of the Signal Processing for Communications and Networking (SPCOM) Technical Committee. He received Research Excellence Award 2013–2014 by CUHK, the 2015 IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award, the 2016 IEEE Signal Processing Letters Best Paper Award, and the 2018 IEEE Signal Processing Best Paper Award. He is an IEEE Fellow and is currently an IEEE SPS Distinguished Lecturer.