Space-time transmit precoding with imperfect feedback

The use of channel feedback from receiver to transmitter is standard in wireline communications. While knowledge of the channel at the transmitter would produce similar benefits for wireless communications as well, the generation of reliable channel feedback is complicated by the rapid time variations of the channel for mobile applications. The purpose of this paper is to provide an information-theoretic perspective on optimum transmitter strategies, and the gains obtained by employing them, for systems with transmit antenna arrays and imperfect channel feedback. The spatial channel, given the feedback, is modeled as a complex Gaussian random vector. Two extreme cases are considered: mean feedback, in which the channel side information resides in the mean of the distribution, with the covariance modeled as white, and covariance feedback, in which the channel is assumed to be varying too rapidly to track its mean, so that the mean is set to zero, and the information regarding the relative geometry of the propagation paths is captured by a nonwhite covariance matrix. In both cases, the optimum transmission strategies, maximizing the information transfer rate, are determined as a solution to simple numerical optimization problems. For both feedback models, our numerical results indicate that, when there is a moderate disparity between the strengths of different paths from the transmitter to the receiver, it is nearly optimal to employ the simple beamforming strategy of transmitting all available power in the direction which the feedback indicates is the strongest.