Event-Driven Optimal Feedback Control for Multi-Antenna Beamforming

Transmit beamforming is a simple multi-antenna technique for increasing throughput and the transmission range of a wireless communication system. The required feedback of channel state information (CSI) can potentially result in excessive overhead especially for high mobility or many antennas. This work concerns efficient feedback for transmit beamforming and establishes a new approach of controlling feedback for maximizing net throughput, defined as throughput minus average feedback cost. The feedback controller using a stationary policy turns CSI feedback on/off according to the system state that comprises the channel state and transmit beamformer. Assuming channel isotropy and Markovity, the controller's state reduces to two scalars. This allows the optimal control policy to be efficiently computed using dynamic programming. Consider the perfect feedback channel free of error, where each feedback instant pays a fixed price. The corresponding optimal feedback control policy is proved to be of the threshold type. This result holds regardless of whether the controller's state space is discretized or continuous. Under the threshold-type policy, feedback is performed whenever a state variable indicating the accuracy of transmit CSI is below a threshold, which varies with channel power. The practical finite-rate feedback channel is also considered. The optimal policy for quantized feedback is proved to be also of the threshold type. The effect of CSI quantization is shown to be equivalent to an increment on the feedback price. Moreover, the increment is upper bounded by the expected logarithm of one minus the quantization error. Finally, simulation shows that feedback control increases net throughput of the conventional periodic feedback by up to 0.5 bit/s/Hz without requiring additional bandwidth or antennas.Comment: 29 pages; submitted for publicatio

Adaptive Bit Partitioning for Multicell Intercell Interference Nulling with Delayed Limited Feedback

Base station cooperation can exploit knowledge of the users' channel state information (CSI) at the transmitters to manage co-channel interference. Users have to feedback CSI of the desired and interfering channels using finite-bandwidth backhaul links. Existing codebook designs for single-cell limited feedback can be used for multicell cooperation by partitioning the available feedback resources between the multiple channels. In this paper, a new feedback-bit allocation strategy is proposed, as a function of the delays in the communication links and received signal strengths in the downlink. Channel temporal correlation is modeled as a function of delay using the Gauss-Markov model. Closed-form expressions for bit partitions are derived to allocate more bits to quantize the stronger channels with smaller delays and fewer bits to weaker channels with larger delays, assuming random vector quantization. Cellular network simulations are used to show that the proposed algorithm yields higher sum-rates than an equal-bit allocation technique.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, July 201