We consider a MIMO fading broadcast channel and compare the achievable
ergodic rates when the channel state information at the transmitter is provided
by analog noisy feedback or by quantized (digital) feedback. The superiority of
digital feedback is shown, with perfect or imperfect CSIR, whenever the number
of feedback channel uses per channel coefficient is larger than 1. Also, we
show that by proper design of the digital feedback link, errors in the feedback
have a minor effect even by using very simple uncoded modulation. Finally, we
show that analog feedback achieves a fraction 1 - 2F of the optimal
multiplexing gain even in the presence of a feedback delay, when the fading
belongs to the class of Doppler processes with normalized maximum Doppler
frequency shift 0 <= F <= 1/2.Comment: Submitted to ISIT, January 2007. 5 page
