Approaching MIMO-OFDM Capacity with Per-Antenna Power and Rate Feedback

This paper presents power-efficient transmission schemes for the multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) block-fading channel under the assumption that the channel during each fading block is known perfectly at the receiver, but is unavailable at the transmitter. Based on the well-known vertical Bell Labs layered space-time (V-BLAST) architecture that employs independent encoding for each transmit antenna and successive decoding at the receiver, this paper presents a per-antenna-based power and rate feedback scheme, termed the "closed-loop" V- BLAST, for which the receiver jointly optimizes the power and rate assignments for all transmit antennas, and then returns them to the transmitter via a low-rate feedback channel. The power and rate optimization minimizes the total transmit power for support of an aggregate transmission rate during each fading block. Convex optimization techniques are used to design efficient algorithms for optimal power and rate allocation. The proposed algorithms are also modified to incorporate practical system constraints on feedback complexity and on modulation and coding. Furthermore, this paper shows that the per-antenna-based power and rate control can be readily modified to combine with the conventional linear MIMO transmit preceding technique as an efficient and capacity-approaching partial-channel-feedback scheme. Simulation results show that the closed-loop V-BLAST is able to approach closely the MIMO-OFDM channel capacity assuming availability of perfect channel knowledge at both the transmitter and the receiver.