Space Division Multiple Access With a Sum Feedback Rate Constraint

On a multi-antenna broadcast channel, simultaneous transmission to multiple users by joint beamforming and scheduling is capable of achieving high throughput, which grows double logarithmically with the number of users. The sum rate for Channel State Information (CSI) feedback, however, increases linearly with the number of users, reducing the effective uplink capacity. To address this problem, a novel Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA) design is proposed, where the sum feedback rate is upper bounded by a constant. This design consists of algorithms for CSI quantization, threshold-based CSI feedback, and joint beamforming and scheduling. The key feature of the proposed approach is the use of feedback thresholds to select feedback users with large channel gains and small CSI quantization errors such that the sum feedback rate constraint is satisfied.