Robust Rate, Power and Precoder Adaptation for Slow Fading MIMO Channels with Noisy Limited Feedback

Channel state information at transmitter (CSIT) is important for achieving high spectral efficiency in multi-input multi-output(MIMO) wireless systems especially for slow fading channels. In practice, only a limited number of bits can be allocated to carry the CSIT feedback, namely the limited feedback. Moreover, the limited CSIT feedback may suffer from noise on feedback channel. With the uncertainty on the CSIT, the packet transmitted may be corrupted (packet outage) if the transmitted rate exceeds the instantaneous mutual information. In this paper, we shall focus on a robust joint rate, power and precoder design for MIMO slow fading channels with noisy limited feedback. We optimize the system goodput (b/s/Hz successfully delivered to the receiver) with respect to a general model of limited feedback error. We show that the codebook design that maximizes the system goodput can be converted to an equivalent "maximin" problem. Numerical results show that the proposed framework can achieve significant goodput gain comparing to various naive designs (designed for error-free limited feedback). Simulation results demonstrated the importance of taking the potential CSIT errors into the limited feedback design for robust performance.