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