QAM Codebooks for Low-Complexity Limited Feedback MIMO Beamforming

This paper proposes a new QAM based codebook for beamforming in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems with a limited-rate feedback channel. We show that such codebooks perform arbitrarily close to the perfect feedback case as the constellation size increases, and that full diversity order is achieved. We demonstrate an equivalence between the problems of beamforming codebook search and noncoherent sequence detection. Based on this we propose a fast beamforming vector search algorithm. Monte-Carlo simulations are presented to show that the performance is comparable to the best known codebooks, and that the search complexity can be reduced by several orders of magnitude.