Orthogonal Beamforming for SDMA Downlink with Limited Feedback

On a multi-antenna downlink channel, separation of multiple users by transmit beamforming enables simultaneous transmission from the base station to the users, resulting in high sum throughput. This paper proposes and analyzes a practical algorithm for joint scheduling and orthogonal beamforming, which is enabled by feedback of quantized channel state information (CSI). In this approach, each user quantizes CSI using a codebook comprised of multiple orthonormal vector sets and sends back quantized CSI. Using feedback CSI, the base station jointly selects a set of orthogonal beamforming vectors and schedules a subset of feedback users for downlink transmission such that the throughput is maximized. For moderate to large numbers of users, the proposed algorithm achieves higher sum capacities than the conventional ones.