How much feedback is required in MIMO Broadcast Channels?

Abstract

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 $θ(\ln \ln \ln N)$, 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 &#34;Generalized Random Beam-Forming&#34; 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.