MIMO Broadcast Scheduling with Limited Feedback

We consider multiuser scheduling with limited feedback of partial channel state information in MIMO broadcast channels. By using spatial multiplexing at the base station (BS) and antenna selection for each user, we propose a multiuser scheduling method that allocates independent information streams from all M transmit antennas to the M most favorable users with the highest signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). A close approximation of the achievable sum-rate throughput for the proposed method is obtained and shown to match the simulation results very well. Moreover, two reduced feedback scheduling approaches are proposed. In the first approach, which we shall refer to as selected feedback scheduling, the users are selected based on their SINR compared to a predesigned threshold. Only those selected users are allowed to feed back limited information to the BS. The resultant feedback load and achievable throughput are derived. It will then be demonstrated that with a proper choice of the threshold, the feedback load can be greatly reduced with a negligible performance loss. The second reduced feedback scheduling approach employs quantization for each user, in which only few bits of quantized SINR are fed back to the BS. Performance analysis will show that even with only 1-bit quantization, the proposed quantized feedback scheduling approach can exploit the multiuser diversity at the expense of slight decrease of throughput.