Reduced space channel feedback for FD-MIMO

To support downlink full-dimension (FD-MIMO) in FDD scenarios, an accurate yet reasonably efficient channel-state-information (CSI) feedback scheme is required to harness the potential beamforming gain offered by the use of a large number of antenna elements in a 2D active antenna array. In this paper, a reduced-spaced channel quantization and feedback scheme which exploits slow variation of the angle-of-departure (AoD) distribution is proposed. By perceiving the instantaneous spatial channel to be a linear combination of slowly varying subset of matrices, it is demonstrated that the proposed scheme offers up to 62.5% dimensionality reduction with negligible throughput loss in 16-antenna FD-MIMO system. When used together with vector quantization, the proposed scheme offers substantial gain over that supported by 3GPP LTE.