Multiuser Scheduling in a Markov-modeled Downlink using Randomly Delayed ARQ Feedback

We focus on the downlink of a cellular system, which corresponds to the bulk of the data transfer in such wireless systems. We address the problem of opportunistic multiuser scheduling under imperfect channel state information, by exploiting the memory inherent in the channel. In our setting, the channel between the base station and each user is modeled by a two-state Markov chain and the scheduled user sends back an ARQ feedback signal that arrives at the scheduler with a random delay that is i.i.d across users and time. The scheduler indirectly estimates the channel via accumulated delayed-ARQ feedback and uses this information to make scheduling decisions. We formulate a throughput maximization problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). For the case of two users in the system, we show that a greedy policy is sum throughput optimal for any distribution on the ARQ feedback delay. For the case of more than two users, we prove that the greedy policy is suboptimal and demonstrate, via numerical studies, that it has near optimal performance. We show that the greedy policy can be implemented by a simple algorithm that does not require the statistics of the underlying Markov channel or the ARQ feedback delay, thus making it robust against errors in system parameter estimation. Establishing an equivalence between the two-user system and a genie-aided system, we obtain a simple closed form expression for the sum capacity of the Markov-modeled downlink. We further derive inner and outer bounds on the capacity region of the Markov-modeled downlink and tighten these bounds for special cases of the system parameters.Comment: Contains 22 pages, 6 figures and 8 tables; revised version including additional analytical and numerical results; work submitted, Feb 2010, to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, revised April 2011; authors can be reached at [email protected]/[email protected]/[email protected]

On the Required Number of Antennas in a Point-to-Point Large-but-Finite MIMO System: Outage-Limited Scenario

This paper investigates the performance of the point-to-point multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems in the presence of a large but finite numbers of antennas at the transmitters and/or receivers. Considering the cases with and without hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) feedback, we determine the minimum numbers of the transmit/receive antennas which are required to satisfy different outage probability constraints. Our results are obtained for different fading conditions and the effect of the power amplifiers efficiency on the performance of the MIMO-HARQ systems is analyzed. Moreover, we derive closed-form expressions for the asymptotic performance of the MIMO-HARQ systems when the number of antennas increases. Our analytical and numerical results show that different outage requirements can be satisfied with relatively few transmit/receive antennas.Comment: Under review in IEEE Transactions on Communication

Turbo Packet Combining for Broadband Space-Time BICM Hybrid-ARQ Systems with Co-Channel Interference

In this paper, efficient turbo packet combining for single carrier (SC) broadband multiple-input--multiple-output (MIMO) hybrid--automatic repeat request (ARQ) transmission with unknown co-channel interference (CCI) is studied. We propose a new frequency domain soft minimum mean square error (MMSE)-based signal level combining technique where received signals and channel frequency responses (CFR)s corresponding to all retransmissions are used to decode the data packet. We provide a recursive implementation algorithm for the introduced scheme, and show that both its computational complexity and memory requirements are quite insensitive to the ARQ delay, i.e., maximum number of ARQ rounds. Furthermore, we analyze the asymptotic performance, and show that under a sum-rank condition on the CCI MIMO ARQ channel, the proposed packet combining scheme is not interference-limited. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the gains offered by the proposed technique.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, and 2 table