Multiple transmit antennas in a downlink channel can provide tremendous capacity (i.e., multiplexing) gains, even when receivers have only single antennas. However, receiver and transmitter channel state information is generally required. In this correspondence, a system where each receiver has perfect channel knowledge, but the transmitter only receives quantized information regarding the channel instantiation is analyzed. The well-known zero-forcing transmission technique is considered, and simple expressions for the throughput degradation due to finite-rate feedback are derived. A key finding is that the feedback rate per mobile must be increased linearly with the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) (in decibels) in order to achieve the full multiplexing gain. This is in sharp contrast to point-to-point multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, in which it is not necessary to increase the feedback rate as a function of the SNR

MIMO Broadcast Channels With Finite-Rate Feedback

It is now well known that employing channel adaptive signaling in wireless communication systems can yield large improvements in almost any performance metric. Unfortunately, many kinds of channel adaptive techniques have been deemed impractical in the past because of the problem of obtaining channel knowledge at the transmitter. The transmitter in many systems (such as those using frequency division duplexing) can not leverage techniques such as training to obtain channel state information. Over the last few years, research has repeatedly shown that allowing the receiver to send a small number of information bits about the channel conditions to the transmitter can allow near optimal channel adaptation. These practical systems, which are commonly referred to as limited or finite-rate feedback systems, supply benefits nearly identical to unrealizable perfect transmitter channel knowledge systems when they are judiciously designed. In this tutorial, we provide a broad look at the field of limited feedback wireless communications. We review work in systems using various combinations of single antenna, multiple antenna, narrowband, broadband, single-user, and multiuser technology. We also provide a synopsis of the role of limited feedback in the standardization of next generation wireless systems.

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An overview of limited feedback in wireless communication systems

Multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) networks reveal the unique opportunities arising from a joint optimization of antenna combining techniques with resource allocation protocols. Furthermore, it brings robustness with respect to multipath richness, allowing for compact antenna spacing at the BS and, crucially, yielding the diversity and multiplexing gains without the need for multiple antenna user terminals. To realize these gains, however, the BS should be informed with the user's channel coefficients, which may limit practical application to TDD or low-mobility settings. To circumvent this problem and reduce feedback load, combining MU-MIMO with opportunistic scheduling seems a promising direction. The success for this type of scheduler is strongly traffic and QoS-dependent, however.

Shifting the MIMO Paradigm

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems use antenna arrays at both the transmitter and receiver to provide communication links with substantial diversity and capacity. Spatial multiplexing is a common space-time modulation technique for MIMO communication systems where independent information streams are sent over different transmit antennas. Unfortunately, spatial multiplexing is sensitive to ill-conditioning of the channel matrix. Precoding can improve the resilience of spatial multiplexing at the expense of full channel knowledge at the transmitter-which is often not realistic. This correspondence proposes a quantized precoding system where the optimal precoder is chosen from a finite codebook known to both receiver and transmitter. The index of the optimal precoder is conveyed from the receiver to the transmitter over a low-delay feedback link. Criteria are presented for selecting the optimal precoding matrix based on the error rate and mutual information for different receiver designs. Codebook design criteria are proposed for each selection criterion by minimizing a bound on the average distortion assuming a Rayleigh-fading matrix channel. The design criteria are shown to be equivalent to packing subspaces in the Grassmann manifold using the projection two-norm and Fubini-Study distances. Simulation results show that the proposed system outperforms antenna subset selection and performs close to optimal unitary precoding with a minimal amount of feedback.

Limited feedback unitary precoding for spatial multiplexing systems

In this paper, we present space shift keying (SSK) as a new modulation scheme, which is based on spatial modulation (SM) concepts. Fading is exploited for multiple-input multiple-output(MIMO) channels to provide better performance over conventional amplitude/phase modulation (APM) techniques. In SSK, it is the antenna index used during transmission that relays information, rather than the transmitted symbols themselves. This absence of symbol information eliminates the transceiver elements necessary for APM transmission and detection (such as coherent detectors). As well, the simplicity involved in modulation reduces the detection complexity compared to that of SM, while achieving almost identical performance gains. Throughout the paper, we illustrate SSK's strength by studying its interaction with the fading channel. We obtain tight upper bounds on bit error probability, and discuss SSK's performance under some non-ideal channel conditions (estimation error and spatial correlation). Analytical and simulation results show performance gains over APM systems (3 dB at a bit error rate of 10-5), making SSK an interesting candidate for future wireless applications. We then extend SSK concepts to incorporate channel coding, where in particular, we consider a bit interleaved coded modulation (BICM) system using iterative decoding for both convolutional and turbo codes. Capacity results are derived, and improvements over APM are illustrated (up to 1 bits/s/Hz), with performance gains of up to 5 dB.

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Space shift keying modulation for MIMO channels

—We consider non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) downlink with a multiple-antenna base station (BS) and single-antenna mobile users. Cell-edge users that are blocked from the BS are assisted by intelligent reﬂective surface (IRS) for data reception. Cell-center and IRS-assist users are paired to share the same frequency-time resource block and zeroforcing transmit beamforming from the BS. We propose to optimize IRS-element coefﬁcients and transmit power to minimize the total power for a given rate threshold. Differing from the existing work, the proposed joint optimization is based on channel covariance instead of fast-changing channel coefﬁcients. Our scheme can reduce larger total power when the number of IRS elements increases. The performance of IRS-assist users decreases signiﬁcantly if the rank of BS-IRS channel matrix is low.

Joint Optimization of IRS Beamforming and Transmit Power for MIMO-NOMA Downlink With Statistical Channel Information

We propose a quantization scheme based on a Kd (K dimensional)-tree algorithm for signature sequence in a reverselink direct sequence (DS)- code division multiple access (CDMA). With a few feedback bits, a receiver quantizes the optimal signature that minimizes interference for a desired user, and relays it to the user via an error-free feedback channel. A user performance depends on the quantization codebook and a number of feedback bits. We show the performance of the proposed Kd-tree codebook with a nearest neighbor criterion and derive the performance approximation. Also we modify the Kd-tree scheme to search for the entry in the codebook, which gives the least interference. Numerical examples show that the Kd-tree codebook performs close to the optimal codebook with only fraction of computational complexity.

Kd-tree codebook for limited feedback CDMA

Given a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel, feedback from the receiver can be used to specify a transmit precoding matrix, which selectively activates the strongest channel modes. Here we analyze the performance of Random Vector Quantization (RVQ), in which the precoding matrix is selected from a random codebook containing independent, isotropically distributed entries. We assume that channel elements are i.i.d. and known to the receiver, which relays the optimal (rate-maximizing) precoder codebook index to the transmitter using B bits. We first derive the large system capacity of beamforming (rank-one precoding matrix) as a function of B, where large system refers to the limit as B and the number of transmit and receive antennas all go to infinity with fixed ratios. With beamforming RVQ is asymptotically optimal, i.e., no other quantization scheme can achieve a larger asymptotic rate. The performance of RVQ is also compared with that of a simpler reduced-rank scalar quantization scheme in which the beamformer is constrained to lie in a random subspace. We subsequently consider a precoding matrix with arbitrary rank, and approximate the asymptotic RVQ performance with optimal and linear receivers (matched filter and Minimum Mean Squared Error (MMSE)). Numerical examples show that these approximations accurately predict the performance of finite-size systems of interest. Given a target spectral efficiency, numerical examples show that the amount of feedback required by the linear MMSE receiver is only slightly more than that required by the optimal receiver, whereas the matched filter can require significantly more feedback.

Capacity of a Multiple-Antenna Fading Channel with a Quantized Precoding Matrix

We consider the quantization of a transmit beamforming vector in multiantenna channels and of a signature vector in code division multiple access (CDMA) systems. Assuming perfect channel knowledge, the receiver selects for a transmitter the vector that maximizes the performance from a random vector quantization (RVQ) codebook, which consists of independent isotropically distributed unit-norm vectors. The quantized vector is then relayed to the transmitter via a rate-limited feedback channel. The RVQ codebook requires an exhaustive search to locate the selected entry. To reduce the search complexity, we apply generalized Lloyd or $k$-dimensional (kd)-tree algorithms to organize RVQ entries into a tree. In examples shown, the search complexity of tree-structured (TS) RVQ can be a few orders of magnitude less than that of the unstructured RVQ for the same performance. We also derive the performance approximation for TS-RVQ in a large system limit, which predicts the performance of a moderate-size system very well.

Tree-Structured Random Vector Quantization for Limited-Feedback Wireless Channels

In downlink, a base station (BS) with multiple transmit antennas applies zeroforcing beamforming to transmit to single-antenna mobile users in a cell. We propose the schemes that optimize transmit power and the number of bits for channel direction information (CDI) for all users to achieve the max-min signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) fairness. The optimal allocation can be obtained by a geometric program for both non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and orthogonal multiple access (OMA). For NOMA, 2 users with highly correlated channels are paired and share the same transmit beamforming. In some small total-CDI rate regimes, we show that NOMA can outperform OMA by as much as 3 dB. The performance gain over OMA increases when the correlation-coefficient threshold for user pairing is set higher. To reduce computational complexity, we propose to allocate transmit power and CDI rate to groups of multiple users instead of individual users. The user grouping scheme is based on K-means over the user SINR. We also propose a progressive filling scheme that performs close to the optimum, but can reduce the computation time by almost 3 orders of magnitude in some numerical examples.

Wiroonsak Santipach

Papers

Joint Optimization of IRS Beamforming and Transmit Power for MIMO-NOMA Downlink With Statistical Channel Information

Kd-tree codebook for limited feedback CDMA

Capacity of a Multiple-Antenna Fading Channel with a Quantized Precoding Matrix

Tree-Structured Random Vector Quantization for Limited-Feedback Wireless Channels

Optimal Transmit Power and Channel-Information Bit Allocation With Zeroforcing Beamforming in MIMO-NOMA and MIMO-OMA Downlinks