Mobile users' data rate and quality of service are limited by the fact that, within the duration of any given call, they experience severe variations in signal attenuation, thereby necessitating the use of some type of diversity. In this two-part paper, we propose a new form of spatial diversity, in which diversity gains are achieved via the cooperation of mobile users. Part I describes the user cooperation strategy while Part II focuses on implementation issues and performance analysis. Results show that, even though the inter-user channel is noisy, cooperation leads not only to an increase in capacity for both users but also to a more robust system, where users' achievable rates are less susceptible to channel variations.

We provide an overview of the extensive recent results on the Shannon capacity of single-user and multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels. Although enormous capacity gains have been predicted for such channels, these predictions are based on somewhat unrealistic assumptions about the underlying time-varying channel model and how well it can be tracked at the receiver, as well as at the transmitter. More realistic assumptions can dramatically impact the potential capacity gains of MIMO techniques. For time-varying MIMO channels there are multiple Shannon theoretic capacity definitions and, for each definition, different correlation models and channel information assumptions that we consider. We first provide a comprehensive summary of ergodic and capacity versus outage results for single-user MIMO channels. These results indicate that the capacity gain obtained from multiple antennas heavily depends

The tradeoff of spectral efficiency (b/s/Hz) versus energy -per-information bit is the key measure of channel capacity in the wideband power-limited regime. This paper finds the fundamental bandwidth--power tradeoff of a general class of channels in the wideband regime characterized by low, but nonzero, spectral efficiency and energy per bit close to the minimum value required for reliable communication. A new criterion for optimality of signaling in the wideband regime is proposed, which, in contrast to the traditional criterion, is meaningful for finite-bandwidth communication.

In this paper, we study a multiple antenna system where the transmitter is equipped with quantized information about instantaneous channel realizations. Assuming that the transmitter uses the quantized information for beamforming, we derive a universal lower bound on the outage probability for any finite set of beamformers. The universal lower bound provides a concise characterization of the gain with each additional bit of feedback information regarding the channel. Using the bound, it is shown that finite information systems approach the perfect information case as (t 1)2 , where B is the number of feedback bits and t is the number of transmit antennas. The geometrical bounding technique, used in the proof of the lower bound, also leads to a design criterion for good beamformers, whose outage performance approaches the lower bound. The design criterion minimizes the maximum inner product between any two beamforming vectors in the beamformer codebook, and is equivalent to the problem of designing unitary space time codes under certain conditions. Finally, we show that good beamformers are good packings of 2-dimensional subspaces in a 2t-dimensional real Grassmannian manifold with chordal distance as the metric.

Abstract—The use of channel feedback from receiver to transmitter is standard in wireline communications. While knowledge of the channel at the transmitter would produce similar benefits for wireless communications as well, the generation of reliable channel feedback is complicated by the rapid time variations of the channel for mobile applications. The purpose of this correspondence is to provide an information–theoretic perspective on optimum transmitter strategies, and the gains obtained by employing them, for systems with transmit antenna arrays and imperfect channel feedback. The spatial channel, given the feedback, is modeled as a complex Gaussian random vector. Two extreme cases are considered: mean feedback, in which the channel side information resides in the mean of the distribution, with the covariance modeled as white, and covariance feedback, in which the channel is assumed to be varying too rapidly to track its mean, so that the mean is set to zero, and the information regarding the relative geometry of the propagation paths is captured by a nonwhite covariance matrix. In both cases, the optimum transmission strategies, maximizing the information transfer rate, are determined as a solution to simple numerical optimization problems. For both feedback models, our numerical results indicate that, when there is a moderate disparity between the strengths of different paths from the transmitter to the receiver, it is nearly optimal to employ the simple beamforming strategy of transmitting all available power in the direction which the feedback indicates is the strongest. Index Terms—Antenna arrays, fading channels, feedback communication, space–time codes, spatial diversity, transmit beamforming, wireless communication. I.

Multiple transmit antennas in a downlink channel can provide tremendous capacity (i.e., multiplexing) gains, even when receivers have only single antennas. However, receiver and transmitter channel state information is generally required. In this correspondence, a system where each receiver has perfect channel knowledge, but the transmitter only receives quantized information regarding the channel instantiation is analyzed. The well-known zero-forcing transmission technique is considered, and simple expressions for the throughput degradation due to finite-rate feedback are derived. A key finding is that the feedback rate per mobile must be increased linearly with the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) (in decibels) in order to achieve the full multiplexing gain. This is in sharp contrast to point-to-point multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, in which it is not necessary to increase the feedback rate as a function of the SNR.

Multiple transmit antennas in a downlink channel can provide tremendous capacity (i.e. multiplexing) gains, even when receivers have only single antennas. However, receiver and transmitter channel state information is generally required. In this paper, a system where each receiver has perfect channel knowledge, but the transmitter only receives quantized information regarding the channel instantiation is analyzed. The well known zero forcing transmission technique is considered, and simple expressions for the throughput degradation due to finite rate feedback are derived. A key finding is that the feedback rate per mobile must be increased linearly with the SNR (in dB) in order to achieve the full multiplexing gain, which is in sharp contrast to point-to-point MIMO systems in which it is not necessary to increase the feedback rate as a function of the SNR. I.

Abstract — We analyze the sum-rate performance of a multiantenna downlink system carrying more users than transmit antennas, with partial channel knowledge at the transmitter due to finite rate feedback. In order to exploit multiuser diversity, we show that the transmitter must have, in addition to directional information, information regarding the quality of each channel. Such information should reflect both the channel magnitude and the quantization error. Expressions for the SINR distribution and the sum-rate are derived, and tradeoffs between the number of feedback bits, the number of users, and the SNR are observed. In particular, for a target performance, having more users reduces feedback load. Index Terms — MIMO, quantized feedback, limited feedback, zero-forcing beamforming, multiuser diversity, broadcast channel,

We consider a MIMO fading broadcast channel and compute achievable ergodic rates when channel state information is acquired at the receivers via downlink training and it is provided to the transmitter by channel state feedback. Unquantized (analog) and quantized (digital) channel state feedback schemes are analyzed and compared under various assumptions. Digital feedback is shown to be potentially superior when the feedback channel uses per channel state coefficient is larger than 1. Also, we show that by proper design of the digital feedback link, errors in the feedback have a minor effect even if simple uncoded modulation is used on the feedback channel. We discuss first the case of an unfaded AWGN feedback channel with orthogonal access and then the case of fading MIMO multi-access (MIMO-MAC). We show that by exploiting the MIMO-MAC nature of the uplink channel, a much better scaling of the feedback channel resource with the number of base station antennas can be achieved. Finally, for the case of delayed feedback, we show that in the realistic case where the fading process has (normalized) maximum Doppler frequency shift 0 ≤ F < 1/2, a fraction 1 − 2F of the optimal multiplexing gain is achievable. The general conclusion of this work is that very significant downlink throughput is achievable with simple and efficient channel state feedback, provided that the feedback link is properly designed.

This paper applies random matrix theory to obtain analytical characterizations of the capacity of correlated multiantenna channels. The analysis is not restricted to the popular separable correlation model, but rather it embraces a more general representation that subsumes most of the channel models that have been treated in the literature. For arbitrary signal-to-noise ratios @ A, the characterization is conducted in the regime of large numbers of antennas. For the low- and high- regions, in turn, we uncover compact capacity expansions that are valid for arbitrary numbers of antennas and that shed insight on how antenna correlation impacts the tradeoffs among power, bandwidth, and rate.