Optimum feedback quantization in an opportunistic beamforming scheme
IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
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In recent years, diversity techniques have evolved into highly attractive technology for wireless communications in different forms. For instance, the channel fluctuations of the users in a network are exploited as multiuser diversity by scheduling the user with the best signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). When fading is slow, beamforming at a multiple antenna transmitter is used to induce artificial channel fluctuations to ensure multiuser diversity in the network. Such a beamforming scheme is called opportunistic beamforming since the transmitter uses random beamforming to artificially induce opportunism in the network [1]. Opportunism requires a large number of users in the system in order to reach the performance of the true beamforming that uses perfect channel state information (CSI). In this paper we investigate the benefit of having partial CSI at an opportunistic transmitter. In the investigation, we focus on the maximum normalized SNR scheduling where user's feedback consists of SNR relative to its channel gain. We show that opportunism can be beneficially used to increase the average throughput of the system. Simulations support the analytical average throughput results obtained as the amount of CSI and the number of users vary.