Compression of Feedback for Adaptive Transmission and Scheduling

For wireless systems with adaptive modulation and/or scheduling, feedback of channel quality information is often necessary. It has been questioned whether the increased system performance is worth the additional feedback rate and the increased algorithm complexity. In this paper, we study how the feedback rate can be minimized, without losing the gains due to adaptive modulation and multiuser diversity. We present an in-depth study of the literature in the area, and evaluate the performance of several state-of-the-art channel quality feedback schemes. By illustrating the compromise between system throughput and feedback channel rate for various schemes, we are able to give valuable insight in choice of method for feedback rate reduction. A major conclusion is that for multicarrier systems, a lossy compression scheme is the best choice, while for single-carrier systems, schemes limiting feedback to only high-SNR users show good performance. Another conclusion is that there are still many issues to study before the schemes can be used in practice.