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

Cooperative Feedback for Multi-Antenna Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive beamforming (CB) is a multi-antenna technique for efficient spectrum sharing between primary users (PUs) and secondary users (SUs) in a cognitive radio network. Specifically, a multi-antenna SU transmitter applies CB to suppress the interference to the PU receivers as well as enhance the corresponding SU-link performance. In this paper, for a multiple-input-single-output (MISO) SU channel coexisting with a single-input-single-output (SISO) PU channel, we propose a new and practical paradigm for designing CB based on the finite-rate cooperative feedback from the PU receiver to the SU transmitter. Specifically, the PU receiver communicates to the SU transmitter the quantized SU-to-PU channel direction information (CDI) for computing the SU transmit beamformer, and the interference power control (IPC) signal that regulates the SU transmission power according to the tolerable interference margin at the PU receiver. Two CB algorithms based on cooperative feedback are proposed: one restricts the SU transmit beamformer to be orthogonal to the quantized SU-to-PU channel direction and the other relaxes such a constraint. In addition, cooperative feedforward of the SU CDI from the SU transmitter to the PU receiver is exploited to allow more efficient cooperative feedback. The outage probabilities of the SU link for different CB and cooperative feedback/feedforward algorithms are analyzed, from which the optimal bit-allocation tradeoff between the CDI and IPC feedback is characterized.Comment: 26 pages; to appear in IEEE Trans. Signal Processin

Space Division Multiple Access with a Sum Feedback Rate Constraint

On a multi-antenna broadcast channel, simultaneous transmission to multiple users by joint beamforming and scheduling is capable of achieving high throughput, which grows double logarithmically with the number of users. The sum rate for channel state information (CSI) feedback, however, increases linearly with the number of users, reducing the effective uplink capacity. To address this problem, a novel space division multiple access (SDMA) design is proposed, where the sum feedback rate is upper-bounded by a constant. This design consists of algorithms for CSI quantization, threshold based CSI feedback, and joint beamforming and scheduling. The key feature of the proposed approach is the use of feedback thresholds to select feedback users with large channel gains and small CSI quantization errors such that the sum feedback rate constraint is satisfied. Despite this constraint, the proposed SDMA design is shown to achieve a sum capacity growth rate close to the optimal one. Moreover, the feedback overflow probability for this design is found to decrease exponentially with the difference between the allowable and the average sum feedback rates. Numerical results show that the proposed SDMA design is capable of attaining higher sum capacities than existing ones, even though the sum feedback rate is bounded.Comment: 29 pages; submitted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin

Performance of Orthogonal Beamforming for SDMA with Limited Feedback

On the multi-antenna broadcast channel, the spatial degrees of freedom support simultaneous transmission to multiple users. The optimal multiuser transmission, known as dirty paper coding, is not directly realizable. Moreover, close-to-optimal solutions such as Tomlinson-Harashima precoding are sensitive to CSI inaccuracy. This paper considers a more practical design called per user unitary and rate control (PU2RC), which has been proposed for emerging cellular standards. PU2RC supports multiuser simultaneous transmission, enables limited feedback, and is capable of exploiting multiuser diversity. Its key feature is an orthogonal beamforming (or precoding) constraint, where each user selects a beamformer (or precoder) from a codebook of multiple orthonormal bases. In this paper, the asymptotic throughput scaling laws for PU2RC with a large user pool are derived for different regimes of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In the multiuser-interference-limited regime, the throughput of PU2RC is shown to scale logarithmically with the number of users. In the normal SNR and noise-limited regimes, the throughput is found to scale double logarithmically with the number of users and also linearly with the number of antennas at the base station. In addition, numerical results show that PU2RC achieves higher throughput and is more robust against CSI quantization errors than the popular alternative of zero-forcing beamforming if the number of users is sufficiently large.Comment: 27 pages; to appear in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technolog

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