Bit Allocation Laws for Multi-Antenna Channel Feedback Quantization: Multi-User Case

Abstract

This paper addresses the optimal design of limited-feedback downlink multi-user spatial multiplexing systems. A multiple-antenna base-station is assumed to serve multiple single-antenna users, who quantize and feed back their channel state information (CSI) through a shared rate-limited feedback channel. The optimization problem is cast in the form of minimizing the average transmission power at the base-station subject to users' target signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratios (SINR) and outage probability constraints. The goal is to derive the feedback bit allocations among the users and the corresponding channel magnitude and direction quantization codebooks in a high-resolution quantization regime. Toward this end, this paper develops an optimization framework using approximate analytical closed-form solutions, the accuracy of which is then verified by numerical results. The results show that, for channels in the real space, the number of channel direction quantization bits should be $(M-1)$ times the number of channel magnitude quantization bits, where $M$ is the number of base-station antennas. Moreover, users with higher requested quality-of-service (QoS), i.e. lower target outage probabilities, and higher requested downlink rates, i.e. higher target SINR's, should use larger shares of the feedback rate. It is also shown that, for the target QoS parameters to be feasible, the total feedback bandwidth should scale logarithmically with the geometric mean of the target SINR values and the geometric mean of the inverse target outage probabilities. In particular, the minimum required feedback rate is shown to increase if the users' target parameters deviate from the corresponding geometric means. Finally, the paper shows that, as the total number of feedback bits $B$ increases, the performance of the limited-feedback system approaches the perfect-CSI system as ${2^{-{B}/{M^2}}}$.