Downlink SDMA with Limited Feedback in Interference-Limited Wireless Networks

The tremendous capacity gains promised by space division multiple access (SDMA) depend critically on the accuracy of the transmit channel state information. In the broadcast channel, even without any network interference, it is known that such gains collapse due to interstream interference if the feedback is delayed or low rate. In this paper, we investigate SDMA in the presence of interference from many other simultaneously active transmitters distributed randomly over the network. In particular we consider zero-forcing beamforming in a decentralized (ad hoc) network where each receiver provides feedback to its respective transmitter. We derive closed-form expressions for the outage probability, network throughput, transmission capacity, and average achievable rate and go on to quantify the degradation in network performance due to residual self-interference as a function of key system parameters. One particular finding is that as in the classical broadcast channel, the per-user feedback rate must increase linearly with the number of transmit antennas and SINR (in dB) for the full multiplexing gains to be preserved with limited feedback. We derive the throughput-maximizing number of streams, establishing that single-stream transmission is optimal in most practically relevant settings. In short, SDMA does not appear to be a prudent design choice for interference-limited wireless networks.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

Is broadcast plus multiaccess optimal for Gaussian wireless networks?

In this paper we show that "separation"-based approaches in wireless networks do not necessarily give good performance in terms of the capacity of the network. Therefore in optimal design of a wireless network, its total structure should be considered. In other words, achieving capacity on the subnetworks of a wireless network does not guarantee globally achieving capacity. We will illustrate this fact by considering some examples of multistage Gaussian wireless relay networks. We will consider a wireless Gaussian relay network with one stage in both fading and nonfading environment. We show that as the number of relay nodes, n, grows large, the capacity of this network scales like log n. We then show that with the "separation"-based scheme, in which the network is viewed as the concatenation of a broadcast and a multiaccess network, the achievable rate scales as log log n and as a constant for fading and nonfading environment, respectively, which is clearly suboptimal