Opportunistic Feedback Reduction for Multiuser MIMO Broadcast Channel with Orthogonal Beamforming

For the multiuser multiple-input multiple-output downlink channel, users feedback their channel state information to help base station schedule users and improve system sum rate. This incurs a large aggregate feedback bandwidth which grows linearly with the number of users. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme to reduce feedback load in a scheduled downlink orthogonal beamforming system by allowing users to opportunistically determine the number of feedback bits to use according to multiple decision thresholds. Through theoretical analysis, we show that, while keeping the aggregate feedback load of the entire system constant regardless of the number of users, the proposed scheme almost achieves the optimal asymptotic sum rate scaling with respect to the number of users (i.e., the multiuser diversity). Specifically, given the number of thresholds, the proposed scheme can achieve a constant portion of the optimal sum rate achievable by the system in which all the users always feedback, and the remaining portion (i.e., the sum rate loss) decreases exponentially to zero as the number of thresholds increases. We further consider feedback design by minimizing the number of thresholds and allocating quantization bits. Simulation shows that the proposed scheme can reduce feedback load and utilize limited feedback bandwidth more effectively than the existing feedback methods.