How much feedback is required in MIMO Broadcast Channels?

In this paper, a downlink communication system, in which a Base Station (BS) equipped with M antennas communicates with N users each equipped with K receive antennas ($K \leq M$), is considered. It is assumed that the receivers have perfect Channel State Information (CSI), while the BS only knows the partial CSI, provided by the receivers via feedback. The minimum amount of feedback required at the BS, to achieve the maximum sum-rate capacity in the asymptotic case of $N \to \infty$ and different ranges of SNR is studied. In the fixed and low SNR regimes, it is demonstrated that to achieve the maximum sum-rate, an infinite amount of feedback is required. Moreover, in order to reduce the gap to the optimum sum-rate to zero, in the fixed SNR regime, the minimum amount of feedback scales as $\theta(\ln \ln \ln N)$, which is achievable by the Random Beam-Forming scheme proposed in [14]. In the high SNR regime, two cases are considered; in the case of $K < M$, it is proved that the minimum amount of feedback bits to reduce the gap between the achievable sum-rate and the maximum sum-rate to zero grows logaritmically with SNR, which is achievable by the "Generalized Random Beam-Forming" scheme, proposed in [18]. In the case of $K = M$, it is shown that by using the Random Beam-Forming scheme and the total amount of feedback not growing with SNR, the maximum sum-rate capacity is achieved.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Trans. on Inform. Theor

Minimal redefinition of the OSV ensemble

In the interesting conjecture, Z_{BH} = |Z_{top}|^2, proposed by Ooguri, Strominger and Vafa (OSV), the black hole ensemble is a mixed ensemble and the resulting degeneracy of states, as obtained from the ensemble inverse-Laplace integration, suffers from prefactors which do not respect the electric-magnetic duality. One idea to overcome this deficiency, as claimed recently, is imposing nontrivial measures for the ensemble sum. We address this problem and upon a redefinition of the OSV ensemble whose variables are as numerous as the electric potentials, show that for restoring the symmetry no non-Euclidean measure is needful. In detail, we rewrite the OSV free energy as a function of new variables which are combinations of the electric-potentials and the black hole charges. Subsequently the Legendre transformation which bridges between the entropy and the black hole free energy in terms of these variables, points to a generalized ensemble. In this context, we will consider all the cases of relevance: small and large black holes, with or without D_6-brane charge. For the case of vanishing D_6-brane charge, the new ensemble is pure canonical and the electric-magnetic duality is restored exactly, leading to proper results for the black hole degeneracy of states. For more general cases, the construction still works well as far as the violation of the duality by the corresponding OSV result is restricted to a prefactor. In a concrete example we shall show that for black holes with non-vanishing D_6-brane charge, there are cases where the duality violation goes beyond this restriction, thus imposing non-trivial measures is incapable of restoring the duality. This observation signals for a deeper modification in the OSV proposal.Comment: 23 pages, v2: minor change

On the Delay-Throughput Tradeoff in Distributed Wireless Networks

This paper deals with the delay-throughput analysis of a single-hop wireless network with $n$ transmitter/receiver pairs. All channels are assumed to be block Rayleigh fading with shadowing, described by parameters $(\alpha,\varpi)$, where $\alpha$ denotes the probability of shadowing and $\varpi$ represents the average cross-link gains. The analysis relies on the distributed on-off power allocation strategy (i.e., links with a direct channel gain above a certain threshold transmit at full power and the rest remain silent) for the deterministic and stochastic packet arrival processes. It is also assumed that each transmitter has a buffer size of one packet and dropping occurs once a packet arrives in the buffer while the previous packet has not been served. In the first part of the paper, we define a new notion of performance in the network, called effective throughput, which captures the effect of arrival process in the network throughput, and maximize it for different cases of packet arrival process. It is proved that the effective throughput of the network asymptotically scales as $\frac{\log n}{\hat{\alpha}}$, with $\hat{\alpha} \triangleq \alpha \varpi$, regardless of the packet arrival process. In the second part of the paper, we present the delay characteristics of the underlying network in terms of the packet dropping probability. We derive the sufficient conditions in the asymptotic case of $n \to \infty$ such that the packet dropping probability tend to zero, while achieving the maximum effective throughput of the network. Finally, we study the trade-off between the effective throughput, delay, and packet dropping probability of the network for different packet arrival processes.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (34 pages

Scheduling and Codeword Length Optimization in Time Varying Wireless Networks

In this paper, a downlink scenario in which a single-antenna base station communicates with K single antenna users, over a time-correlated fading channel, is considered. It is assumed that channel state information is perfectly known at each receiver, while the statistical characteristics of the fading process and the fading gain at the beginning of each frame are known to the transmitter. By evaluating the random coding error exponent of the time-correlated fading channel, it is shown that there is an optimal codeword length which maximizes the throughput. The throughput of the conventional scheduling that transmits to the user with the maximum signal to noise ratio is examined using both fixed length codewords and variable length codewords. Although optimizing the codeword length improves the performance, it is shown that using the conventional scheduling, the gap between the achievable throughput and the maximum possible throughput of the system tends to infinity as K goes to infinity. A simple scheduling that considers both the signal to noise ratio and the channel time variation is proposed. It is shown that by using this scheduling, the gap between the achievable throughput and the maximum throughput of the system approaches zero