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

Improving Energy Efficiency Through Multimode Transmission in the Downlink MIMO Systems

Adaptively adjusting system parameters including bandwidth, transmit power and mode to maximize the "Bits per-Joule" energy efficiency (BPJ-EE) in the downlink MIMO systems with imperfect channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) is considered in this paper. By mode we refer to choice of transmission schemes i.e. singular value decomposition (SVD) or block diagonalization (BD), active transmit/receive antenna number and active user number. We derive optimal bandwidth and transmit power for each dedicated mode at first. During the derivation, accurate capacity estimation strategies are proposed to cope with the imperfect CSIT caused capacity prediction problem. Then, an ergodic capacity based mode switching strategy is proposed to further improve the BPJ-EE, which provides insights on the preferred mode under given scenarios. Mode switching compromises different power parts, exploits the tradeoff between the multiplexing gain and the imperfect CSIT caused inter-user interference, improves the BPJ-EE significantly.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figures, EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking; EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking (2011) 2011:20