Frequency Domain Scheduling for OFDMA with Limited and Noisy Channel Feedback

In this study we analyze the downlink OFDMA system level performance for three different channel quality indicator (CQI) reporting schemes. The effect of terminal measurement and estimation errors, quantization from formatting and compression, and uplink reporting delays and detection errors are included. We find that a simple threshold-based CQI scheme provides an attractive trade-off between downlink system level performance and uplink CQI signaling overhead, as compared to using a best-M scheme. When applied to the UTRAN LTE system in a 10 MHz bandwidth, we find that a frequency domain packet scheduling gain of 40% is achievable with a CQI word size of only 30-bits. Finally, the effect of applying a so-called outer loop link adaptation algorithm is reported.