On the Required Accuracy of Transmitter Channel State Information in Multiple Antenna Broadcast Channels

A multiple antenna broadcast channel (multiple transmit antennas, one antenna at each receiver) with imperfect channel state information available to the transmitter is considered. If perfect channel state information is available to the transmitter, then a multiplexing gain equal to the minimum of the number of transmit antennas and the number of receivers is achievable. On the other hand, if each receiver has identical fading statistics and the transmitter has no channel information, the maximum achievable multiplexing gain is only one. The focus of this paper is on determination of necessary and sufficient conditions on the rate at which CSIT quality must improve with SNR in order for full multiplexing gain to be achievable. The main result of the paper shows that scaling CSIT quality such that the CSIT error is dominated by the inverse of the SNR is both necessary and sufficient to achieve the full multiplexing gain as well as a bounded rate offset (i.e., the sum rate has no negative sub-logarithmic terms) in the compound channel setting.