Quantized vs. Analog Channel Feedback for FDD Massive MIMO Systems with Multiple-Antenna Users

In this paper, we consider the problem of Angle of Departure (AoD) based channel feedback in Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems with multiple antennas at the users. We consider the use of Zero-Forcing Block Diagonalization (BD) as the downlink precoding scheme. We consider two different cases; one in which the number of streams intended for a user equals the number of antennas at that user and the other case in which the number of streams is less than the number of user antennas. BD requires the feedback of the subspace spanned by the channel matrix at the user or a subspace of it in the case of having less number of streams than the number of antennas at a specific user. Based on our channel model, we propose a channel feedback scheme that requires less feedback overhead compared to feeding back the whole channel matrix. Then, we quantify the rate gap between the rate of the system with perfect Channel State Information (CSI) at the massive MIMO Basestation (BS) and our proposed channel feedback scheme for a given number of feedback bits. Finally, we design feedback codebooks based on optimal subspace packing in the Grassmannian manifold. We show that our proposed codes achieve performance that is very close to the performance of the system with perfect CSI at the BS.

In multiuser massive MIMO systems, it is not clear whether users should feed back the channel or the precoder when they can exchange the channel state information (CSI). This paper compares the precoder feedback scheme with the channel feedback scheme. It is found that when there are sufficient number of bits for CSI exchange, the precoder feedback scheme can reduce the interference leakage to 1 /(K − 1) of the channel feedback scheme, where K is the number of users. Moreover, the interference leakage under the precoder feedback scheme decreases faster than the channel feedback scheme when the number of feedback bits increases.

A multihop regenerative relay system is considered. We explore adaptive power allocation (PA) under a total power constraint to minimize the system error probability when the perfect channel state information (CSI) is known at the transmitters. We propose adaptive PA schemes with limited feedback when the transmitters have no perfect knowledge of CSI. Simulation results demonstrate the good performance of the proposed PA scheme with perfect CSI. When no perfect CSI is available at the transmitters, the proposed PA schemes with a small number of feedback bits are able to achieve very close performance to the adaptive PA with perfect CSI.

In this paper, a comprehensive comparison analysis in terms of outage probability and average symbol error ratio (SER) is presented for cooperative cognitive multiple-input and multiple-output (CC-MIMO) multiuser systems with amplify-and-forward (AF) protocol. Specially, we consider two scenarios where the CC-MIMO multiuser systems have the perfect and imperfect channel state information (CSI). The CC-MIMO multiuser systems consist of one multi-antenna source, one single-antenna relay, and multiple multi-antenna destinations. At the secondary source and destinations, the maximal ratio transmission (MRT) and maximal ratio combining (MRC) are employed, respectively. For such CC-MIMO multiuser systems, we first obtain the exact closed-form expressions of outage probability under the two cases where the CC-MIMO multiuser systems have the perfect and imperfect CSI. Then, to reduce the implementation complexity, the tight lower bounds of outage probability and average SER are derived. Finally, to obtain insight, by using the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) approximation, the asymptotic estimations of outage probability are achieved. The numerical results show that the derivations are agreed with the simulations, which validate our derivations. At the same time, the results show that, for the systems without perfect CSI, the achievable diversity order reduces to one, regardless of the number of antennas at the cognitive source and destinations as well as the number of the cognitive destinations. Nevertheless, these key parameters affect the coding gain of the CC-MIMO multiuser systems. When the systems have the perfect CSI (or without feedback delay), the achievable diversity gain is determined by the minimum between the number of source’s antennas and the product of the number of destinations and the number of destination’s antennas. For the effect of PU’s parameters, our results indicate that primary systems only affect the coding gain but not the diversity gain.

In this paper, we study a MIMO fading broadcast channel where each receiver has perfect channel state information while the channel state information at the transmitter is acquired by explicit channel feedback from each receiver through capacity-constrained feedback links. Two feedback schemes are considered, i.e., the analog and digital feedback. We analyze the achievable ergodic rates of zero-forcing dirty-paper coding (ZF-DPC), which is a nonlinear precoding scheme inherently superior to linear ZF beamforming. Closed-form lower and upper bounds on the achievable ergodic rates of ZF-DPC with Gaussian inputs and uniform power allocation are derived. Based on the closed-form rate bounds, sufficient and necessary conditions on the feedback channels to ensure nonzero and full downlink multiplexing gain are obtained. Specifically, for analog feedback in both AWGN and Rayleigh fading feedback channels, it is sufficient and necessary to scale the average feedback link SNR linearly with the downlink SNR in order to achieve the full multiplexing gain. While for the random vector quantization-based digital feedback with angle distortion measure in an error-free feedback link, it is sufficient and necessary to scale the number of feedback bits B per user as where M is the number of transmit antennas and is the average downlink SNR.

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems are a main enabler of the excessive throughput requirements in 5G and future generation wireless networks as they can serve many users simultaneously with high spectral and energy efficiency. To achieve this massive MIMO systems require accurate and timely channel state information (CSI), which is acquired by a training process that involves pilot transmission, CSI estimation, and feedback. This training process incurs a training overhead, which scales with the number of antennas, users, and subcarriers. Reducing the training overhead in massive MIMO systems has been a major topic of research since the emergence of the concept. Recently, deep learning (DL)-based approaches have been proposed and shown to provide significant reduction in the CSI acquisition and feedback overhead in massive MIMO systems compared to traditional techniques. In this paper, we present an overview of the state-of-the-art DL architectures and algorithms used for CSI acquisition and feedback, and provide further research directions.

In wireless communication systems, the intended receiver is able to obtain the perfect channel state information (CSI) as long as the training sequence is sufficiently long, and then through a quantized feedback channel (QFC), the transmitter gets imperfect CSI caused by the quantized noise. In general, the design of efficient coding schemes for wireless channels with imperfect CSI at the transmitter (I-CSIT) is difficult and challenging, and one possible method is to construct such a scheme by using channel feedback. In the literature, it has already been shown that the classical Schalkwijk-Kailath (SK) scheme for the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel with noiseless feedback is a highly efficient coding scheme since its coding complexity is extremely low and the decoding error doubly exponentially decays as the coding blocklength tends to infinity. Existing SK-type schemes mainly focus on the case that perfect CSI is known at the transceiver, and adopt modulo lattice function to eliminate the impact of feedback channel noise (often considered as AWGN) on the performance of SK-type schemes. However, for channels with I-CSIT and QFC, this does not work since the distribution of quantized noise is unknown and I-CSIT brings additional non-convergence estimation error to the transceiver, leading to the application of SK-type schemes to practical wireless scenarios becomes challenging. In this paper, first, for the quasi-static fading channel with I-CSIT and QFC, we design a modulo lattice based SK-type scheme where the receiver adopts an auxiliary signal to decode the message, and numerical results show that the rate of our scheme almost approaches that of the same model with perfect CSI at the transceiver and noise-free feedback for some cases. Next, we further extend the above scheme to the two-path fading scenario, which is modeled as the two-ray channel with I-CSIT and QFC. Treating the signal of the second path as a relay, our extended scheme combines the amplify-and-forward relay strategy and the previously proposed scheme for the same model without ISI. However, this extended scheme cannot be applied to multi-path fading scenario, to this end, we propose a new SK-type scheme for the multi-path fading case. The intuition behind this scheme is to transform the multi-path fading channel into a fading MIMO channel by discrete fourier transform (DFT), and then apply the SK-type scheme to the MIMO channel in frequency domain and use inverse DFT to obtain the codeword in time domain. The study of this paper may provide a way to design efficient coding scheme for fading channels in the presence of imperfect CSI and quantized feedback.

ABSTRACTBy combining Spatial modulation (SM) with cooperative communication, the diversity gain brought by cooperative relaying and high rate of SM can be obtained. In this paper, considering amplify-and-forward (AF) protocol, the performance of cooperative SM system with imperfect channel state information (CSI) over Rayleigh channel is analyzed. According to the performance analysis, the moment generating functions (MGFs) of effective signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) are derived. With the MGFs, closed-form expressions of the error probability of antenna index detection and the error probability of symbol detection for imperfect CSI are achieved. Thereby, the approximate overall average bit error ratio (BER) is obtained, and these theoretical expressions include those under perfect CSI as special cases. Besides, the asymptotically approximate BER for large SNR is also derived. Based on this, a suboptimal power allocation (PA) scheme is developed, and the corresponding PA coefficients are attained by minimizing the asymptotical BER. As a result, closed-form PA can be attained for the system with multiple receive antennas. Computer simulations show that the theoretical BERs are close to the corresponding simulated results, which illustrates the effectiveness of the derived theoretical expressions. Compared with the conventional equal PA scheme, the proposed PA scheme enhances the BER performance efficiently.

Accurate channel state information (CSI) at base station (BS) is the key to achieve full multiplexing and diversity gain in traditional multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. In frequency-division-duplex (FDD) systems, it is obtained through downlink training and uplink feedback. However, the training and feedback overhead in massive MIMO systems is unacceptable for the large number of antennas equipped at BS. To reduce the CSI feedback overhead and improve CSI quantization accuracy, we propose a limited feedback scheme for spatio-temporal correlated massive MIMO channel. The proposed scheme jointly performs Karhunen-Loève transform (KLT) and polar-cap quantization on CSI. For the compactly deployed antennas at BS, there exists spatial correlation in massive MIMO channel. When the user equipment (UE) moves slowly, adjacent channels feature temporal correlation. The high dimensional and spatial correlated CSI is compressed through KLT. Then the compressed CSI is normalized to be isotropic to perform polar-cap quantization. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is capable of improving the sum-rate performance with limited feedback bits for massive MIMO systems.

In a single-input single-output (SISO) downlink with multiple users, to obtain the multiuser diversity gain, the full channel state information (CSI) for all users is required for selecting the 'best' user and transmission mode. However, feedback channels are often capable of carrying only a limited number of bits. With such rate-limited feedback links, we intend to maximize the sum-rate of systems with average power and bit-error rate (BER) constraints by varying the transmission mode according to feedback information. Althrough in multiuser systems with finite-rate feedback, the scheduled user is not necessarily the 'best' user, this work turns out to be a design of transmission modes based on CSI of the 'best' user. A nested iterative algorithm is proposed to obtain optimal thresholds and discrete transmission modes. Simulation results demonstrate the throughput with finite-rate feedback approaches that with perfect CSI when the feedback rate increases. As the number of users increases, the multiuser diversity gain is achieved and the average feedback load is reduced without the decrease of throughput.

This paper studies the effect of relay selection on the average achievable rate of a two-hop block-fading channel in which some amplify-and-forward (AF) relays connect the main transmitter to the destination. It is assumed that the transmitter does not know any of the instantaneous channel state information (CSI) values regarding the first or the second hops, while a central node has the corresponding CSI of all links and decides the relay which is best to amplify its received signal, based on the Maximum-SNR criteria. The lack of CSI at the transmitter makes the transmitter employ multi-layer coding or outage approach to send its desired data to the destination. The equivalent channel gain associated with the considered communication channel is modeled, and the average achievable rate of the network is formalized. Moreover, the average achievable rate of the network is analyzed in the case of having perfect CSI at the transmitter as an upper bound. Simulation results show that increasing the number of relays can improve the average achievable rate of the network and fill the gap of not having the CSI for lower relay numbers, while the total transmit power of the network is fixed.

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is a promising approach for cellular communication due to its energy efficiency and high achievable data rate. These advantages, however, can be realized only when channel state information (CSI) is available at the transmitter. Since there are many antennas, CSI is too large to feed back without compression. To compress CSI, prior work has applied compressive sensing (CS) techniques and the fact that CSI can be sparsified. The adopted sparsifying bases fail, however, to reflect the spatial correlation and channel conditions or to be feasible in practice. In this paper, we propose a new sparsifying basis that reflects the long-term characteristics of the channel, and needs no change as long as the spatial correlation model does not change. We propose a new reconstruction algorithm for CS, and also suggest dimensionality reduction as a compression method. To feed back compressed CSI in practice, we propose a new codebook for the compressed channel quantization assuming no other-cell interference. Numerical results confirm that the proposed channel feedback mechanisms show better performance in point-to-point (single-user) and point-to-multi-point (multi-user) scenarios.

In the presence of perfect channel state information (CSI), the achievable degrees of freedom (DoF) in wireless interference networks can be linearly scaled up with the number of users. Achievability is based on the idea of interference alignment (IA). However, in the presence of imperfect CSI, the sum rate becomes degraded, and full DoF may no longer be achievable. In this paper, the authors propose novel least squares (LS)- and minimum mean square error (MMSE)-based IA schemes that adaptively design beamformers by relying on the availability of imperfect CSI and knowledge of the channel estimation error variance in advance. Interestingly and unlike the other robust algorithms, the proposed adaptive schemes do not impose extra computational complexity compared to their nonadaptive counterparts. It is shown that the LS-based IA is able to outperform interference leakage minimization algorithms under both perfect and imperfect CSI. Furthermore, the authors compare the performance of the proposed MMSE-based IA with maximum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (Max-SINR) algorithm. The authors show that while under perfect CSI, the MMSE-based IA achieves the same performance as that of Max-SINR, the former outperforms the latter under CSI mismatch. Meanwhile, it is shown that the proposed MMSE-based IA needs less CSI to be available and has less computational complexity compared to Max-SINR.

Hybrid beamforming offers a low hardware complexity for millimeter wave massive multiple-input multiple-output systems, which is divided among the analog radio frequency precoding and digital baseband precoding. In order to provide channel state information for the base station, channel feedback is essential, especially in frequency division duplexing systems. However, in large antenna systems, the size of channel matrix is huge, and the overhead of feedback complete channel is not acceptable. To reduce the feedback overhead for hybrid beamforming, leveraging the property that the millimeter wave path angles of departure vary more slowly than the path gains, we propose a two-timescale hybrid beamforming/combining algorithm for downlink multi-streams millimeter wave systems. We analyze the performance of the proposed algorithm with perfect channel state information, and the analytical and simulation results show that proposed algorithm can achieve the same performance of full digital singular value decomposition algorithm. We also analyze the rate gap between the proposed algorithm with perfect channel state information and limited feedback. The rate gap caused by quantization of radio frequency and baseband precoder codebooks are decoupled, and the quantization error is analyzed. At last, we provide a closed-form expression of relationship between feedback bits and rate gap.

The channel capacity of MIMO system increases as a function of antenna pairs between transmitter and receiver but it suffers from multiple expensive RF chains. To reduce cost of RF chains, antenna selection (AS) method can offer a good tradeoff between expense and performance. For a transmitting AS system, channel state information (CSI) feedback is required to choose the best subset of available antennas. However, the delay and error in feedback channel are the most dominant factors to degrade performances. In this paper, the concept of AS method using reciprocal CSI instead of feedback channel is proposed. The capacity performance of proposed system is investigated by own developing Testbed. The obtained results indicate that the reciprocity technique offers a capacity close to a system with perfect CSI and gains a higher capacity than a system without AS method. This benefit is from 0.9 to 2.2 bps/Hz at SNR 10 dB.