A limited feedback scheme based on spatially correlated channels for coordinated multipoint systems

High spectral efficiency can be achieved in the downlink of multi-antenna coordinated multi-point systems provided that the multiuser interference is appropriately managed at the transmitter side. For this sake, downlink channel information needs to be sent back by the users, thus reducing the rate available at the uplink channel. The amount and type of feedback information required has been extensively studied and many limited feedback schemes have been proposed lately. A common pattern to all of them is that achieving low rates of feedback information is possible at the cost of increasing complexity at the user side and, sometimes, assuming that some statistics of the channel are known. In this article, we propose a simple and versatile limited feedback scheme that exploits the spatial correlation at each multi-antenna base station (BS) without requiring any previous statistical information of the channel and without adding significant computational complexity. It is based on the separate quantization of the channel impulse response modulus and phase and it shows better mean square error performance than the standard scheme based on quantization of real and imaginary parts. In order to evaluate the performance of the downlink regarding multiuser interference management, different precoding techniques at the BSs, such as zero-forcing (ZF), Tomlinson-Harashima precoding (THP) and lattice reduction TomlinsonHarashima precoding (LRTHP), have been evaluated. Simulations results show that LRTHP and THP present a higher robustness than ZF precoding against channel quantization errors but at the cost of a higher complexity at the BS. Regarding sum-capacity and bit error rate performances, our versatile scheme achieves better results than the standard one in the medium and high SNR regime, that is, in the region where quantization errors are dominant against noise, for the same feedback cost measured in bits per user.