Adaptive V-BLAST with partial channel state information feedback

We are motivated to improve the performance of Vertical Bell Laboratories Layered Space-Time (V-BLAST) systems by applying link adaptation techniques based on partial channel state information (CSI) feedback. In our scheme, the partial channel state information is the second order statistics that are always available in practical applications. We derive the criteria that decide the optimal transmission policy based on minimum bit error probability. Simulations show that our scheme provides considerable performance gain over traditional V-BLAST transmission scheme. Since the second-order channel statistics varies much more slowly than instantaneous channel realization, the proposed technique would have practical applications in downlink multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems that exhibit fading correlations between antennas.