On the achievable rates of multiple antenna broadcast channels with feedback-link capacity constraint

In this paper, we study a MIMO fading broadcast channel where each receiver has perfect channel state information while the channel state information at the transmitter is acquired by explicit channel feedback from each receiver through capacity-constrained feedback links. Two feedback schemes are considered, i.e., the analog and digital feedback. We analyze the achievable ergodic rates of zero-forcing dirty-paper coding (ZF-DPC), which is a nonlinear precoding scheme inherently superior to linear ZF beamforming. Closed-form lower and upper bounds on the achievable ergodic rates of ZF-DPC with Gaussian inputs and uniform power allocation are derived. Based on the closed-form rate bounds, sufficient and necessary conditions on the feedback channels to ensure nonzero and full downlink multiplexing gain are obtained. Specifically, for analog feedback in both AWGN and Rayleigh fading feedback channels, it is sufficient and necessary to scale the average feedback link SNR linearly with the downlink SNR in order to achieve the full multiplexing gain. While for the random vector quantization-based digital feedback with angle distortion measure in an error-free feedback link, it is sufficient and necessary to scale the number of feedback bits B per user as B = (M − 1)log2 P N0 where M is the number of transmit antennas and P N0 is the average downlink SNR.