Effective Capacity Maximization in Multi-Antenna Channels with Covariance Feedback

The tradeoff between average transmission rate and average delay is important for the system design of future wireless communication systems. In double-correlated multiple antenna channels, the spatial degrees of freedom allow to optimize the transmit strategy under throughput/delay priority. In this work, we maximize the effective capacity of a MIMO system with covariance feedback. Interestingly, the larger the delay requirement is, the more spatial degrees of freedom are used to avoid low instantaneous transmission rates. This fact is shown analytically by deriving a closed-form expression for the beamforming optimality range as a function of the spatial correlation, the SNR, and the QoS exponent. Numerical simulations illustrate the average effective capacity optimization and confirm the theoretical results.