Two-stage channel feedback for beamforming and scheduling in network MIMO systems

This paper proposes an efficient two-stage beamforming and scheduling algorithm for the limited-feedback cooperative multi-point (CoMP) systems. The system includes multiple base-stations cooperatively transmitting data to a pool of users, which share a rate-limited feedback channel for sending back the channel state information (CSI). The feedback mechanism is divided into two stages that are used separately for scheduling and beamforming. In the first stage, the users report their best channel gain from all the base-station antennas and the basestations schedule the best user for each of their antennas. The scheduled users are then polled in the second stage to feedback their quantized channel vectors. The paper proposes an analytical framework to derive the bit allocation between the two feedback stages and the bit allocation for quantizing each user's CSI. For a total number of feedback bits B, it is shown that the number of bits assigned to the second feedback stage should scale as log B. Furthermore, in quantizing channel vectors from different base-stations, each user should allocate its feedback budget in proportion to the logarithm of the corresponding channel gains. These bit allocation are then used to show that the overall system performance scales double-logarithmically with B and logarithmically with the transmit SNR. The paper further presents several numerical results to show that, in comparison with other beamforming-scheduling algorithms in the literature, the proposed scheme provides a consistent improvement in downlink sum rate and network utility. Such improvements, in particular, are achieved in spite of a significant reduction in the beamforming-scheduling computational complexity, which makes the proposed scheme an attractive solution for practical system implementations.