According to an aspect of an embodiment, a base station configured for beamforming estimation in a massive multiple input multiple output (mMIMO) radio access network (RAN) (mMIMO-RAN) may comprise a processing device and a transceiver. The processing device may be configured to compute, at the base station, a precoder based on jointly maximizing the signal with respect to noise and minimizing an interference with respect to the noise using an approximate decoder. The processing device may be configured to compute, at the base station, the precoder based on a power constraint. The processing device may be configured to generate, at the base station, the precoder for precoding a downlink signal for transmission from the base station to a user equipment (UE). The transceiver may be configured to transmit the DL signal to the UE.