Performance Analysis of Quantized Beamforming MIMO Systems

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems can achieve significant diversity and array gain by using single-stream transmit beamforming and receive combining. A MIMO beamforming system with feedback using a codebook based quantization of the beamforming vector allows practical implementation of such a strategy in a single-user scenario. The performance of this system in uncorrelated Rayleigh flat fading channels is studied from the point-of-view of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and outage probability. In this paper, lower bounds are derived on the expected SNR loss and the outage probability of systems that have a single receive antenna or two transmit antennas. For arbitrary transmit and receive antennas, approximations for the SNR loss and outage are derived. In particular, the SNR loss in a quantized MIMO beamforming system is characterized as a function of the number of quantization bits and the number of transmit and receive antennas. The analytical expressions are proved to be tight with asymptotically large feedback rate. Simulations show that the bounds and approximations are tight even at low feedback rates, thereby providing a benchmark for feedback system design