Differential Feedback in Codebook-Based Multiuser MIMO Systems in Slowly Varying Channels

In downlink multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, system performance highly depends on the reliability of downlink channel state information (CSI) at the base station (BS). In frequency division duplexing, the most practical solution is to have downlink CSI from the users fed back to the BS. Most work on this feedback design has assumed independent block fading channels. However, this paper proposes a new differential feedback scheme using the observation that the channel realizations are usually temporally correlated. The sum-rate loss assuming differential feedback is analyzed for a system with the number of users K equal to the number of transmit antennas M. When K >; M, a user selection algorithm based on an approximated signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) estimation is proposed. In simulation results, the proposed differential feedback scheme increases the sum-rate compared to previous differential feedback schemes. Moreover, the proposed user selection algorithm outperforms semi-orthogonal user selection in the moderate signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region, despite requiring less feedback information. In low mobility channels, utilizing the channels' time correlation during quantization is shown to play a bigger role in determining sum-rate performance than multiuser diversity for most SNR regimes when a practical number of users is considered.