Acquiring Partial CSI for Spatially Selective Transmission by Instantaneous Channel Norm Feedback

in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (2008), 56(3), 11881204

In the design of next-generation multiuser communication systems, multiple-antenna transmission is an essential part providing additional spatial degrees of freedom and allowing efficient use of resources ... [more ▼]

In the design of next-generation multiuser communication systems, multiple-antenna transmission is an essential part providing additional spatial degrees of freedom and allowing efficient use of resources. A major limiting factor in the resource allocation is the amount of channel state information (CSI) available at the transmitter, particularly in multiuser systems where the feedback from each user terminal must be limited. Herein, we show that the Euclidean norm of the instantaneous channel, when combined with long-term channel statistics provides sufficient information for the transmitter to efficiently utilize multiuser diversity in time, frequency, and space. We consider the downlink of a communication system where the base station has multiple transmit antennas whereas each user terminal has a single receive antenna. The CSI provided by channel statistics and feedback of the norm of the instantaneous channel vector is studied in depth for correlated Rayleigh and Ricean fading channels, within a minimum mean-square error (MMSE) estimation framework. An asymptotic analysis (high instantaneous SNR) is presented which shows that channel realizations with large channel norm provide additional spatial CSI at the transmitter. This makes the proposed scheme ideal for multiuser diversity transmission schemes, where resources are only allocated to users experiencing favorable channel conditions. [less ▲]

Feedback design in multiuser MIMO systems using quantization splitting and hybrid instantaneous/statistical channel information

in Proceedings ICT Mobile and Wireless Communications Summit (2008)

In the design of next generation multiuser communication systems, multiple antenna transmission is an essential part providing spatial multiplexing gain and allowing efficient use of resources. A major ... [more ▼]

In the design of next generation multiuser communication systems, multiple antenna transmission is an essential part providing spatial multiplexing gain and allowing efficient use of resources. A major limiting factor in the resource allocation is the amount of channel state information (CSI) available at the transmitter, particularly in multiuser systems where the feedback from each user terminal must be limited. To this effect we propose two independent approaches for an efficient representation of the channel in multiuser MIMO systems. In the first approach, channel quantization is considered where the total number of feedback bits is limited. A resource allocation scheme is proposed where the available rate is split between the scheduling phase, where all users feed back a coarse CSI quantization, and the precoding phase where the selected receivers refine their CSI. The optimum splitting of the available feedback rate provides a large increase in performance and even simple heuristic splitting gives a noticeable advantage. In the second approach, we exploit a combination of instantaneous and statistical channel information. For spatially correlated Rayleigh and Ricean channels, it is shown that the CSI to large extent can be represented by the channel norm when the long-term channel statistics are known. Within a minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimation framework, feedback of a few bits of the quantized channel norm is sufficient to perform efficient resource allocation and achieve performance close to that of full CSI. [less ▲]