Two-Stage Channel Quantization for Scheduling and Beamforming in Network MIMO Systems: Feedback Design and Scaling Laws

This paper proposes an efficient two-stage channel quantization and feedback scheme for the downlink limited-feedback network multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. In the first stage, the users report their best set of base-station antenna and physical resource block combinations, and the base-stations schedule the best user for each antenna in each resource block. The scheduled users are then polled in the second stage to feedback their quantized channel vectors. This paper proposes an analytical framework to show that, under a total feedback budget of B bits, the number of bits assigned to the second feedback stage should scale as log B, and in quantizing channel vectors from different base-stations, each user should allocate feedback bits in proportion to the channel magnitudes in dB scale. Under these optimized bit allocations, the overall sum rate of the system is shown to scale double-logarithmically with B, linearly with the total number of antennas, and logarithmically with transmit power, thus achieving both multiuser diversity and spatial multiplexing gains under limited feedback. Finally, realistic wireless propagation model of an urban small-cell deployment is used to show that the proposed scheme can approach the performance of a network MIMO system with full channel state information with only modest amount of channel feedback.