MIMO Systems in the Presence of Feedback Delay

Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems can achieve high data-rate and high capacity transmission. In MIMO systems, eigen-beam space division multiplexing (E-SDM) that achieves much higher capacity by weighting at the transmitter based on feedback channel state information (CSI) has been studied. Early studies for E-SDM have assumed perfect CSI at the transmitter. However, in practice, the CSI fed back to the transmitter from the receiver becomes outdated due to the time-varying nature of the channels and feedback delay. Therefore, an outdated E-SDM cannot achieve the full performance possible. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of E-SDM with methods for reducing performance degradation due to feedback delay. We use three methods; 1) method that predicts CSI at future times when it will be used and feeds the predicted CSI back to the transmitter (denoted hereafter as channel prediction); 2), 3) method that uses the receive weight based on zero-forcing (ZF) or minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion instead of those based on singular value decomposition (SVD) criterion (denoted hereafter as ZF or MMSE-based receive weight). We also propose methods that combine channel prediction with ZF or MMSE-based receive weight. Simulation results show that bit error rate (BER) degradation of E-SDM in the presence of feedback delay is reduced by using methods for reducing performance degradation due to feedback delay. We also show that methods that combine channel prediction with ZF or MMSE-based receive weight can achieve good BER even when the large feedback delay exists.