Fast transfer of channel state information in wireless systems

Knowledge of accurate and timely channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter is becoming increasingly important in wireless communication systems. While it is often assumed that the receiver (whether base station or mobile) needs to know the channel for accurate power control, scheduling, and data demodulation, it is now known that the transmitter (especially the base station) can also benefit greatly from this information. For example, recent results in multiantenna multiuser systems show that large throughput gains are possible when the base station uses multiple antennas and a known channel to transmit distinct messages simultaneously and selectively to many single-antenna users. In time-division duplex systems, where the base station and mobiles share the same frequency band for transmission, the base station can exploit reciprocity to obtain the forward channel from pilots received over the reverse channel. Frequency-division duplex systems are more difficult because the base station transmits and receives on different frequencies and therefore cannot use the received pilot to infer anything about the multiantenna transmit channel. Nevertheless, we show that the time occupied in frequency-duplex CSI transfer is generally less than one might expect and falls as the number of antennas increases. Thus, although the total amount of channel information increases with the number of antennas at the base station, the burden of learning this information at the base station paradoxically decreases. Thus, the advantages of having more antennas at the base station extend from having network gains to learning the channel information. We quantify our gains using linear analog modulation which avoids digitizing and coding the CSI and therefore can convey information very rapidly and can be readily analyzed. The old paradigm that it is not worth the effort to learn channel information at the transmitter should be revisited since the effort decreases and the gain increases with the number of antennas.