); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (W.W.); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (X.G. )1  
[PERSON]  
1 National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China;  
[EMAIL_ADDRESS] (X.C. ); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (W.W.); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (X.G. )1  
[PERSON]  
1 National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China;  
[EMAIL_ADDRESS] (X.C. ); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (W.W.); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (X.G. )1  
[PERSON]  
1 National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China;  
[EMAIL_ADDRESS] (W.W.); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (X.G. )1  
[PERSON]  
1 National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China;  
[EMAIL_ADDRESS] (W.W.); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (X.G. )1  
[PERSON]  
1 National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China;  
[EMAIL_ADDRESS] (X.C. ); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (W.W.); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (X.G. )1  
[PERSON]  
1 National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China;  
[EMAIL_ADDRESS] (X.C. ); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (W.W.); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (X.G. )1  
[PERSON]  
1 National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China;  
[EMAIL_ADDRESS] (W.W.); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (X.G. )1  
[PERSON]  
1 National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China;  
[EMAIL_ADDRESS] (X.C. ); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (W.W.); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (X.G. )1  
[PERSON]  
1 National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China;  
[EMAIL_ADDRESS] (W.W.); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (X.G. )1  
[PERSON]  
1 National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China;  
[EMAIL_ADDRESS] (X.C. ); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (W.W.); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (X.  
coordinated multi-cell MIMO transmission will lead to a significant signalling overhead. In addition, for massive MIMO transmission with large numbers of BS antennas, acquisition of instantaneous CSI at the BS is not an easy task due to some practical limitations such as hardware imperfections and feedback overhead [23; 24; 25; 26]. Thus, it is of more practical interest to exploit statistical CSI for coordinated multi-cell massive MIMO transmission since statistical CSI varies much more slowly than instantaneous CSI. Motivated by the above practical considerations, we investigate coordinated multicast precoding for multi-cell massive MIMO transmission exploiting statistical CSI in this paper. In our work, each BS only utilizes statistical CSI of UTs in the corresponding coordinated network to perform multicast transmission. In addition, the massive MIMO channel structures are exploited to simplify multicast transmission design. The major contributions of this work are summarized as follows:  
* With the design goal to maximize the sum of the achievable ergodic multicast rate in coordinated multi-cell massive MIMO multicast precoding, we show that it is optimal for each BS to transmit the multicast signals in the beam domain. * We propose an iterative beam domain power allocation algorithm for coordinated multicast transmission via invoking the minorization-maximization (MM) framework. Our proposed algorithm is guaranteed to converge to a stationary point. * We employ the large-dimensional random matrix theory to derive the deterministic equivalent (DE) of the optimization objective to further reduce the computational complexity. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. We present the system model in Section 2. Coordinated multicast precoding for multi-cell massive MIMO transmission is investigated in Section 3. Numerical results are presented in Section 4 and the paper is concluded in Section 5. The following notations are used throughout the paper. Upper and lower case boldface letters denote matrices and column vectors, respectively. We adopt \(\mathbb{C}^{M\times N}\) and \(\mathbb{R}^{M\times N}\) to denote the \(M\times N\) dimensional complex-valued and real-valued vector space, respectively.