Opportunistic Two-Stage Feedback and Scheduling for MIMO Downlink Systems

We propose an opportunistic two-stage feedback and scheduling algorithm that is based upon zero-forcing beamforming with semi-orthogonal user selection (ZFBF-SUS) to reduce its feedback load. In an SUS algorithm, a base station schedules semi-orthogonal users using the feedback of all users´ channel information. However, such feedback overhead significantly increases with the number of users. To reduce the feedback load of ZFBF-SUS systems, the proposed two-stage feedback scheme opportunistically and separately exploits the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio and orthogonality in each stage such that only a fraction of users feed back their channel information. Based on this opportunistic feedback scheme, we decouple the entire process of the SUS into two sub-processes. The proposed two-stage feedback and scheduling scheme effectively exclude the inappropriate users for ZFBF transmission in both feedback and scheduling periods, and thus save the scarce resources consumed for the feedback process. We derive an analytical expression for the average number of feedback bits of the proposed system and optimize it in an averaged sense. Further, the sum-rate of the proposed system is theoretically investigated. Both analytical and simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves the performance of conventional ZFBF-SUS systems with a significantly reduced number of feedback bits.