Asymptotic Capacity of Multicarrier Transmission With Frequency-Selective Fading and Limited Feedback

We study the capacity of multicarrier transmission through a slow frequency-selective fading channel with limited feedback, which specifies channel state information. Our results are asymptotic in the number of subchannels . We first assume independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) subchannel gains, and show that, for a large class of fading distributions, a uniform power distribution over an optimized subset of subchannels, or on-off power allocation, gives the same asymptotic growth in capacity as optimal water filling, e.g., with Rayleigh fading. Furthermore, the growth in data rate can be achieved with a feedback rate as . If the number of active subchannels is bounded, the capacity grows only as with the feedback rate of . We then consider correlated subchannels modeled as a Markov process, and study the savings in feedback. Assuming a fixed ratio of coherence bandwidth to the total bandwidth, the ratio between minimum feedback rates with correlated and i.i.d. subchannels converges to zero with , e.g., as for Rayleigh-fading subchannels satisfying a first-order autoregressive process. We also show that adaptive modulation, or rate control schemes, in which the rate on each subchannel is selected from a quantized set, achieves the same asymptotic growth rates in capacity and required feedback. Finally, our results are extended to cellular uplink and downlink channel models.