Improving MU-MIMO performance in LTE-(advanced) by efficiently exploiting feedback resources and through dynamic scheduling

Multi-user MIMO communication can provide significant gains by exploiting spatial multiplexing. However, it requires better feedback to provide accurate channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) for minimizing the multiuser interference. 3GPP LTE provides support for MU-MIMO, but it is not sufficient to extract sizable gains. In this paper, our primary goal is to efficiently exploit the system's resources for MU-MIMO in LTE. In the existing 3GPP LTE standard (Rel. 8), we observed that the transmission mode 5 (TM5) dedicated for MU-MIMO utilizes wideband feedback method for providing channel directional information/ precoding matrix indicator (CDI/PMI). The standard supports finer granularity feedback i.e. sub-band feedback method, but it's not utilized for MU-MIMO and restricted only to SU-MIMO. Therefore in this work, we propose to exploit the sub-band feedback for providing more frequent update of PMI. However, in order to support this feedback method, we need to propose a new downlink control information (DCI) format for TM5 that will contain additional fields in comparison to the existing DCI format 1D. Furthermore, to extract optimal performance at the system level, we also propose a MAC-layer scheduling algorithm that deals with resource management on sub-band basis. Utilizing these proposed methods, we show considerable gains in MU-MIMO for 3GPP LTE at the system level.