MIMO systems with limited rate differential feedback in slowly varying channels

In this paper, an adaptive limited feedback linear precoding technique for temporally correlated multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels is proposed, where the receiver has perfect channel knowledge but the transmitter only receives a quantized channel direction. To perform adaptation to the time correlation structure, we employ a differential feedback, where the "amount" of the perturbation added to the previous precoder is determined by the statistics of the directional variation. Based on random matrix quantization analysis, we develop a spherical cap codebook approach, where the cap is centered at the previous precoder and the radius of the cap is determined proportional to the identified directional variation. If the channel is highly correlated in time, it is shown that the proposed differential feedback scheme achieves significant throughput improvement in the large codebook size regime. The rest of the paper is devoted to developing a systematic spherical cap codebook generation method. The developed approach employs a feedback scheme that uses a differential rotation of the previously used precoder. Our codebook adaptation is based on generating a perturbation in Euclidean space and projecting the perturbation onto the unitary space. Simulation results show that the proposed adaptation scheme accurately tracks the channel using only a small rate of feedback. © 2006 IEEE.