On the encoding rate and discrete modulation adaptation design for MIMO links

It is well-known that MIMO links in slow fading channels can benefit significantly through rate and power adaptations when there is knowledge of channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT). However, practical MIMO transmitter can only support finite combinations of the channel encoding rates and modulation constellation levels due to the finite number of bits allocated in the control overhead (embedded in the packet transmission). In this paper, we shall address various practical MIMO adaptation design issues associated with discrete transmission modes. We propose a systematic design framework to address the MIMO adaptation design based on information theoretical framework. The design problem is cast into an optimization problem similar to the classical vector quantization problem with a modified distortion measure. As an illustration, we apply the design framework to a 2 times 2 MIMO link and compare the goodput performance with the optimal performance predicted by the theory. We found that the goodput performance of the MIMO link predicted by the theoretical framework matches the actual performance closely