2132
4, APRIL 2009
Limited Feedback Design for
MIMO Broadcast Channels with ARQ Mechanism
Wei Xu, Student Member, IEEE, Chunming Zhao, Member, IEEE, and Zhi Ding, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract—We investigate the design of a limited feedback
mechanism for multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) broad-
cast systems that are equipped with automatic repeat request
(ARQ) capabilities. Given multiple antennas at the base-station
(BS) and single antenna subscribers, we focus on maximizing the
ergodic system sum capacity and propose an adaptive feedback
bit allocation scheme under the constraint of total feedback
bandwidth. Furthermore, we develop two efficient feedback
allocation schemes based on asymptotic analysis. We present
simulation results that verify the effectiveness of the proposed
adaptive allocation schemes.
Index Terms—Sum capacity, MIMO, broadcast channels (BC),
Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ), limited feedback.
I. I NTRODUCTION
R ECENTLY, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)
transceiver technologies have generated a great deal
of research interest in wireless communications. The main
MIMO attraction lies in their ability to achieve considerably
high channel capacity [1], [2]. In a downlink channel, MIMO
can support simultaneous signal transmission for multiple
data streams. Existing works in [3]–[8] have extensively
investigated the theoretic and achievable capacity of MIMO
broadcast channels (BC). In particular, studies in [3]–[5]
determined the full sum capacity region of MIMO BC. In
[6], it is shown that the full capacity can be achieved by
dirty paper coding (DPC) [9]. However, DPC implementation
can be impractical in many applications because of its high
complexity. Therefore, cost-effective methods have been in-
vestigated to achieve a balanced tradeoff between complexity
and achievable capacity [7]. One such simple method is the
zero-forcing beamforming (ZFBF) technique [8]. It is much
simpler and achieves a part of the full sum capacity [10].
Most of the multiuser MIMO schemes require full channel
state information (CSI) of user channels at the base station
(BS). This requirement poses a bandwidth burden on feedback
links especially for MIMO system with many users. One way
to ease the feedback burden is to exploit the limited feedback
strategy by letting users quantize their CSI with a given
Manuscript received July 3, 2008; revised October 20, 2008; accepted
November 20, 2008. The associate editor coordinating the review of this paper
and approving it for publication was C. Xiao.
This work was supported in part by the MOST (China) 973 under Grant-
2007CB31060 and the National High Technology Research and Development
Program (863) of China under Grant 2006AA01Z263. This work was also
supported in part by Ericsson.
W. Xu and C. Zhao are with the National Mobile Communications Research
Lab., Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China (e-mail: {weiwell hsu,
cmzhao2}@seu.edu.cn).
Z. Ding is with the Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University
of California, Davis, CA 95616 USA (e-mail: zding@ece.ucdavis.edu).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TWC.2009.080886
1536-1276/09$25.00 
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 8, NO.
codebook and then only send the index of the quantization
back to the transmitter. This will naturally lead to perfor-
mance degradation. Works in [15], [16] and the references
therein have investigated the multiuser MIMO with limited
feedback where ZFBF is exploited. Although multiuser MIMO
with limited feedback has attracted significant interests from
researchers, the problem of packet failure was generally left
out of consideration.
Packet transmission may fail because the practical MIMO
channels may encounter severe distortion and fading. When a
packet fails to be correctly decoded by the receiver, Automatic
Repeat reQuest (ARQ) is one of the widely used techniques
to ameliorate packet errors by retransmitting the same packet.
To optimize the performance of MIMO systems with ARQ
strategy, some studies focus on the joint design of ARQ
and MIMO transmission technologies. Previous works [11],
[12] have investigated the optimum MIMO precoder design
for single-user MIMO systems with ARQ under perfect CSI
at both sides. With only statistical channel information at
the transmitter, [13] considers the optimal precoder design
for the system with channel mean feedback. Recently, [14]
extends the works to precoder optimization for multiuser
MIMO systems with ARQ. Nevertheless, the limited feedback
scheme for multiuser systems with MIMO-ARQ has seldom
been discussed in the literature.
In this paper, we study the effective means of multiuser CSI
quantization for the feedback channel of limited bandwidth.
We consider a limited feedback multiuser MIMO system
equipped with ARQ for packet error correction. We let the
total available bandwidth of the feedback link be limited to
BT bits per time-slot. Without ARQ, we can allow each of
the M simultaneously scheduled users to quantize its CSI
using BT /M bits per time-slot. However, when some users
are required to retransmit their erroneous packets, it would be
a more efficient way to design the channel quantization scheme
by adaptively allocating the bandwidth to different users. By
maximizing the sum capacity during each transmission time-
slot, we propose an adaptive scheme for feedback bandwidth
allocation in multiuser MIMO systems involving ARQ re-
transmissions. The proposed scheme dynamically allocates
different numbers of quantization bits to users according to
their (re)transmission states. Here we summarize our key
contributions and findings.
1) We establish that optimized feedback bit allocation can
effectively improve the sum capacity of a limited feed-
back multiuser MIMO system equipped with ARQ.
2) The adaptive feedback bit allocation varies with the
number of user retransmissions. In particular, for a fixed
c 2009 IEEE
XU et al.: LIMITED FEEDBACK DESIGN FOR MIMO BROADCAST CHANNELS WITH ARQ MECHANISM 2133

SNR, feedback bits should be equally allocated among all
users when they are in their first transmissions. However,
when retransmission users are involved, we need to assign
more feedback bits to the users in their first transmissions.
The results show that it can be a waste to assign CSI
feedback bits to users that retransmit multiple times.
3) For systems with very high SNR, we find it nearly
optimal to allocate all the available bandwidth (bits) to
only users sending packets in their first transmission
phases. On the other hand, under low SNR, we should
equally assign the feedback bandwidth to all users and
achieve a sum capacity that is nearly optimum.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section
II introduces the system model. Section III studies the quanti-
zation bandwidth allocation problem for a system where only a
single user requires retransmission. We then extend the scheme
to multiuser retransmission scenarios. Under the asymptotic
analysis, Section IV develops the proposed schemes for low
and high SNRs, respectively. Section V extends our work to
the heterogeneous user case. In Section VI, we provide the
simulation results before concluding in Section VII.
II. MIMO B ROADCAST C HANNEL WITH Q UANTIZED CSI
F EEDBACK
We first define the notations to be used in this paper. We use
boldface uppercase to denote matrices and boldface lowercase
to denote vectors. In particular, I is an identity matrix. AH
and |A| denote the conjugate transpose and the determinant
of a matrix A, respectively. |a| returns the l2 norm of vector
a. Finally, E{·} represents statistical expectation (ensemble
average).
users are assumed to be homogeneous [7], [15], [16], [19].
Therefore, the path loss attenuation from the BS to all the
receiving users is assumed to be the same. In other words,
Ai is a constant for every user. However, we will show
in Section V that the proposed schemes can be generalized
to heterogeneous users with different levels of path loss
attenuation. By considering the system average SNR to be P ,
we can normalize the received signal in (2) by letting Ai = 1
for all users
and adding an additional total BS transmit power
constraint i E{|xi,t |2 } ≤ P . Thus, the received signal in (2)
can be rewritten as
M

√ H √ H
yi,t = gi,t hi,t fi,t xi,t + gi,t hi,t fj,t xj,t + ni,t ,
j=i,j=1
i = 1, · · · , M. (3)
At the beginning of each time-slot, each user will quantize
its normalized (directional) CSI hi,t with a given codebook
B. We assume that the codebooks are predetermined and
known at both the terminal and the BS. With conventional
channel quantization scheme as stated in the above section,
the codebook size of B is set to 2B for all users, and the
quantized CSI is denoted by hi,t . The indices of the quantized
CSI will then be sent back to the BS through the user feedback
channel. Once given hi,t ’s from all terminals, the BS can
calculate its ZF beamformers fi,t (i = 1, · · · , M ) according
to the conditions hHi,t fj,t = 0 (∀i = j). Therefore, the received
signal-to-noise-plus interference ratio (SINR) at user i during
time-slot t is given by
|h̃H
i,t fi,t |
2
SINRi,t =  (4)
1/ρ + j=i |h̃H i,t fj,t |
2

We consider the broadcast downlink of a multiuser MIMO where ρ = M P

denotes equal power allocation of transmitted
system with M antennas located at the BS serving K single signals. In addition, the sum capacity of our system at time-
antenna users. For analytical simplicity, we assume that K = slot t is obtained by
M in our study. Denote Ai as the large scale average path loss
M

of user i, and let the MIMO flat fading channel of the i−th
user terminal at time-slot t be an M × 1 vector h̃i,t , whose Rt = log (1 + SINRi,t ) . (5)
i=1
entries are assumed to be independent, identically distributed
(i.i.d.) complex Gaussian with zero mean and unit variance. When the current data packet to user k ends in error, we
Assume that the full CSI is known at all user terminals and consider an ARQ mechanism that retransmits the same packet
we decompose it by in the next time-slot. Furthermore, user k will utilize multiple
√ transmissions to jointly decode the data packet. Assume data
h̃i,t = gi,t hi,t . (1) xk,t+1 for user k be transmitted for the L−th time in the time-
slot (t + L). Without loss of generality, we simply let t = 0
We can use the scalar gi,t = |h̃i,t |2 to represent the channel
in this paper. Accordingly, the received symbol at user k after
gain by normalizing the channel vector as hi,t . Let xi,t denote
L transmissions can be jointly represented as
the data symbol of user i from the BS in the t−th time-slot
⎡ ⎤ ⎡ H ⎤ ⎡  ⎤
and let ni,t denote the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) yk,1 h̃k,1 fk,1 h̃H
k,1 j=k fj,1 xj,1
with zero mean and unit variant at the i−th user receiver. The ⎢ yk,2 ⎥ ⎢ h̃H
⎥ ⎢ H ⎥
⎢ ⎥ ⎢ k,2 fk,2 ⎥ ⎢ h̃k,2 j=k fj,2 xj,2 ⎥
⎢ ⎥ ⎢ ⎥ + nk
i−th user in time-slot t receives signal ⎢ .. ⎥ = ⎢
⎣ . ⎦ ⎣ .. ⎥ xk,1 + ⎢ .. ⎥
. ⎦ ⎣ . ⎦
  M
 
y k,L h̃H
fk,L h̃H
f x
j=k j,L j,L
yi,t = gi,t Ai hHi,t fi,t xi,t + gi,t Ai hH
i,t fj,t xj,t + ni,t ,     k,L   
k,L
 
j=i,j=1 yk H w̃k
i = 1, · · · , M (2) (6)
where n is the vector of independent Gaussian noise samples
where the unit-norm vector fi,t is the ZFBF weight vector at in L transmissions. After each detection failure, the user sends
the BS for user i at time-slot t. back its CSI to the BS under limited feedback constraint before
Moreover in this study, we first focus on a widely con- the ARQ retransmission. The (re)transmission and feedback
sidered limited feedback MIMO system model where the interaction of this system is shown in Fig. 1.

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2134 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 8, NO. 4, APRIL 2009

calculate channel quant.

BS side calculate ZFBF f i ,t bits B i for each user user retransmission can be calculated by
 

o.

on r
|h̃H 2

e d st fo
1,L f1,L |

rs h inf

broa

B i fo
ot.

s
bit
use nel

som reque
RL =α + β + log 1 + γ

i ,t


dca ers

i
B
for chan

re
1/ρ + j=1 |h̃H 1,L fj,L |
2

us

ith
st d

ach
ran ers

: w
zed  

ata

ret e us

user
s.,
i

1
ant
M

for

,t 


so m
|h̃H
k,L fk,L |
2

hi
User side
qu

i 1, ..., M all users check for user i quantizes its + log 1 +  . (9)
retrans. (ARQ) channel with B i bits: hi,t 1
k=2
1/ρ + j=k |h̃H k,L fj,L |
2

Fig. 1. The (re)transmission and feedback model of our system. To allocate feedback bandwidth for data transmission during
the L−th time-slot, the goal can be formulated as
max RL
Bk ,k=1,··· ,M
III. A DAPTIVE Q UANTIZATION BANDWIDTH A LLOCATION
M

FOR ARQ R ETRANSMISSION
subject to : Bk ≤ BT (10)
k=1
When all users are transmitting their data packets for
the first time, the CSI quantization scheme is the same as where Bk represents the number of channel quantization bits
that in conventional systems without ARQ. Since the overall for user k at the L−th time-slot. Moreover as stated before,
bandwidth of the feedback link for quantization bits is limited since α and β in I(y1 , x1,1 ) are constants at the beginning
by BT bits per time-slot for all scheduled users, each user of the L−th time-slot, the objective function in (10) can be
will discretize its CSI using B = BT /M bits in its feedback. equivalent to
 
What becomes interesting is when one or more of the users |h̃H
1,L f1,L |
2

are requesting data retransmissions. It is not clear what kind max log 1 + γ 
Bk ,k=1,··· ,M 1/ρ + j=1 |h̃H 1,L fj,L |
2
of bit allocation subject to a total bandwidth constraint can  
M
provide better performance. User sending back more accurate |h̃H
k,L fk,L |
2

CSI, the BS will be more likely to achieve better performance. + log 1 +  (11)
k=2
1/ρ + j=k |h̃H k,L fj,L |
2
For example, if the BS receives full CSI of user k, then user k
will receive no multi-user interference in ZFBF. On the other From this formulation, we find that the user under ARQ has a
hand, since the users under retransmissions have obtained special parameter γ ranges from 0 to 1. This parameter affects
some information regarding its data during previous, albeit the feedback bandwidth allocation and distinguishes the ARQ
failed, transmissions, it may be more cost effective to allocate user from the other users (still in first transmission). From
more feedback bits to users in their first transmissions. In this (11), we make the following observations:
work, limiting overall feedback bandwidth to BT , our goal • For users in their first transmission, their parameter γ
is to design an adaptive allocation scheme for CSI feedback equals 1. Feedback bits should be equally allocated to all
during ARQ in order to maximize the sum capacity of the such users.
MIMO system. • For a retransmission user with γ → 0, it is wasteful to
assign bits for its CSI feedback. This scenario can occur
when a user is retransmitting the same packet multiple
times.
A. Bandwidth Allocation for Single-user Retransmission
In practice, the optimization of (11) takes place before the
We first consider the transmission time-slot during which L−th time-slot. It is paradoxical that the optimum feedback
only a single user, indexed by 1, retransmits its data for L bit allocation requires instantaneous CSI of users at the L−th
times and users 2 to M are all transmitting new data packets time-slot. Thus practical means of bit allocation must not
in the first attempt. By jointly detecting the received symbol rely on instantaneous CSI knowledge. Instead, we should
given in (6) for user 1, the mutual information for the 1st user reformulate the problem to utilize long-term average CSI.
under Gaussian noise w̃1 is
B. Approximate Optimization of Ergodic Capacity
 
−1 −1
I(y1 , x1,1 ) = log det Rw̃w̃2 Ryy Rw̃w̃2 (7) For practical reasons, we reformulate our problem by maxi-
mizing the statistical expectation of the object function in (11).
    Applying Jensen’s inequality on E{log(1 + x)} ≤ log(1 +
where Rw̃w̃ = E w̃k w̃kH and Ryy = E yk ykH are the
E{x}), the ergodic optimization problem can be converted to
auto-correlation matrices for user k = 1. It can be further   
reduced to (please see Appendix A) |h̃H
1,L f1,L |
2
max log 1 + γE 
  Bk ,k=1,··· ,M 1/ρ + j=1 |h̃H 1,L fj,L |
2
|h̃H
1,L f1,L |
2
M
  
I(y1 , x1,1 ) = α + β + log 1 + γ   |h̃H
k,L fk,L |
2
1/ρ + j=1 |h̃H 1,L fj,L |
2 + log 1 + E 
(8) k=2
1/ρ + j=k |h̃H k,L fj,L |
2

where α and β are constants depending on transmissions in M


the previous (L − 1) time-slots while γ is defined in (34). subject to : Bk ≤ BT . (12)
Accordingly, the sum capacity of our system with a single- k=1

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XU et al.: LIMITED FEEDBACK DESIGN FOR MIMO BROADCAST CHANNELS WITH ARQ MECHANISM 2135

It has been shown in [16] that statistically by [15] which shows that the capacity degradation due to
gk β(1, M − 1) CSI quantization error becomes more pronounced as SNR
SINRk =  (13) increases. Thus, for fairness consideration at very high SNRs,
1/ρ + gk (1 − |hH 2
k hk | ) j=k β(1, M − 2) we need accurate CSI from users. However, all these users are
where β(·, ·) denotes a Beta-distributed random variable with assumed to be homogeneous and we have no instantaneous
given parameters. Further from [17], it shows that the distri- CSI prior to feedback bandwidth allocation in a given time-
bution of (1 − |hH 2
k hk | ) with a well-designed codebook of
slot. Thus, it is reasonable to assign all users under first
Bk
size 2 follows transmissions equal number of CSI quantization bits. With
Bk this modification, our proposed feedback bit allocation for
f1−|hH
k hk |
2 (x) = 2
Bk
(M − 1)xM−2 , 0 ≤ x ≤ 2− M −1 . (14) multiuser MIMO systems under ARQ is summarized as Al-
As a result, we can approximate the average SINR by gorithm 1, which returns Bk (k = 1, · · · , M ) as the feedback
bit allocation.
1
E{SINRk } ≈ Bk . (15)
1/ρ + (M − 1)2− M −1 Algorithm 1 : Quantization Bandwidth Allocation for Single-
User Retransmission Scenario
Therefore, a simple substitution of this result into (12) changes
Define Bk = 1 (k = 1, · · · , M ) and N = BT − M .
its objective function into
  while N > 0 do
γ Calculate Δ1 (B1 ) according to (17).
max log 1 + B1 k ∗ = argk=2,··· ,M min Bk .
Bk ,k=1,··· ,M
1/ρ + (M − 1)2− M −1
  Calculate Δk∗ (Bk∗ ).
M
1 if Δk∗ (Bk∗ ) ≥ Δ1 (B1 ) then
+ log 1 + . (16)
1/ρ + (M − 1)2− M −1
Bk
Bk∗ = Bk∗ + 1.
k=2
else
Because the value of γ [see Appendix A, (34)] depends B1 = B1 + 1.
on the full MIMO channel information, the value of γ is end if
unknown at the BS which poses a serious difficulty for the N = N − 1.
BS to solve the bit allocation problem. To circumvent this end while
problem, we derive an approximation to γ̂ in Appendix B.
Using the approximation, the BS can use only the quantized
CSI to determine the values of γ̂ for the retransmission user. From this algorithm, we can find that the specific bandwidth
To maximize the objective function in (16), we utilize the allocation scheme for the feedback channel varies with the
greedy searching method. In fact, our problem is similar to (re)transmission counters L of the users. In particular, the
the conventional adaptive bit allocation problem for multi- value of L affects the allocation scheme through the calcu-
carrier (OFDM) systems. Therefore, borrowing ideas from the lation of Δk in (17). In this expression, the approximation γ̂
primary allocation algorithm in [18], we design our bandwidth is obtained from (37) which depends on L. Different values
allocation scheme with a discrete bit-loading process. In our of L change both the values and sizes of the matrix H1 in
approach, the CSI feedback (quantization) bits are incremen- (37). Moreover, the calculation of γ̂ in (37) is also affected
tally allocated and each bit is assigned to the user which can by {B1,1 , · · · , B1,L−1 } which depends on the retransmission
yield the largest contribution to the objective in (16). More counter L.
specifically, we quantify the additional gain obtained from
assigning one more CSI bit to user k:
  C. Extension to Multiuser ARQ
γ̂k Thus far, we have limited our discussion of limited CSI
Δk (Bk ) = log 1 + Bk +1
1/ρ + (M − 1)2− M −1 feedback to the case of a single user ARQ. We now extend
  to the more general case of ARQ retransmission involving
γ̂k
− log 1 + Bk , 1 ≤ Bk ≤ BT multiple users encountering packet errors.
1/ρ + (M − 1)2− M −1 Without loss of generality, we assume that the first N of M
(17) users request retransmission in the current time-slot. Following
where the approximation γ̂k , instead of the exact value of γ, is the approach applied to the single user ARQ case, we obtain
used for calculation. Accordingly, our quantization bit-loading the feedback bandwidth allocation problem as follows:
algorithm starts from an initial all-one bit allocation (Bk = 1 N
 
 |h̃H 2
for 1 ≤ k ≤ M ). We then add one bit at a time to the user k fk |
max log 1 + γk 
that can provide the largest Δk until BT bits are exhausted. It Bk , k=1,··· ,M
k=1
1/ρ + j=k |h̃H k fj |
2
 
is important to note that for users in their first transmission, M
|h̃H
k fk |
2
γ̂k = 1 is set. For users with identical γ̂k and identical Bk , + log 1 + 
the extra bit can be randomly assigned to one. k=N +1
1/ρ + j=k |h̃H k fj |
2

One concern, however, is that under high SNR, incremental M


bit-loading according to Δk may be severely unfair among subject to: Bk ≤ BT (18)
users under first transmissions. One such evidence is given k=1

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2136 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 8, NO. 4, APRIL 2009

where h and f , respectively, represent the corresponding allocate all available quantization bits to the users in their
channel and beamformer vectors of the current time-slot. We first transmissions, i.e., Bk (k = N + 1, · · · , M ). Moreover,
again use a channel-dependent parameter γk for the k−th since each scheduled user will quantize its channel with at
ARQ user as in (34). Since different ARQ users may request least 1 bit, i.e., Bk ≥ 1 for all k, our asymptotic allocation
different number of retransmissions, the value of γk varies scheme at high SNR is simply
from user to user. By further exploiting the approximation 
γ̂k defined in (37) and maximizing the upper bound of the 1, k = 1, · · · , N,
Bk = (21)
expected object function in (18) as follows (BT − N )/(M − N ), k = N + 1, · · · , M.
N
 
 γ̂k
max log 1 + Bk B. Efficient Allocation for Asymptotically Low SNR
Bk ,k=1,··· ,M
k=1 1/ρ + (M − 1)2− M −1
  Another interesting case is when the SNR is asymptotically
M
1 low. We begin with the original problem in (18). By using
+ log 1 + .
Bk
1/ρ + (M − 1)2− M −1 log(1 + x) ≈ x for small x ≥ 0, the optimization problem at
k=N +1
(19) low SNRs can be translated into
N

This problem is similar as the optimization problem for single- γ̂
max B1
user retransmission scenarios. Therefore, we can design a Bk ,k=1,··· ,M
k=1 1/ρ + (M − 1)2− M −1
generalized allocation scheme in Algorithm 2 based on the M
 1
similar principles applied in deriving Algorithm 1. + Bk
k=N +1 1/ρ + (M − 1)2− M −1
Algorithm 2 : Quantization Bandwidth Allocation for Mul- M

tiuser Retransmissions subject to : Bk ≤ BT . (22)
Define Bk = 1 (k = 1, · · · , M ) and N = BT − M . k=1
while N > 0 do
From this formulation, it can be found that the quantization
Calculate Δk (Bk ) (k = 1, · · · , N ) according to (17).
bits Bk will make less contribution to the final objective
k ∗ = argk=N +1,··· ,M min Bk .
function since 1/ρ will dominate the denominators at low
Calculate Δk∗ (Bk∗ ).
SNR. Therefore, equal bandwidth allocation scheme, which
t = argt∈{1,··· ,N,k∗ } max Δt (Bt ).
is the same scheme for conventional system without any ARQ
Bt = Bt + 1.
user, is asymptotically optimal for our system in the low SNR
N = N − 1.
regime.
end while

V. E XTENSION TO H ETEROGENEOUS U SER S CENARIOS

IV. S IMPLIFICATIONS FROM A SYMPTOTIC SNR A NALYSIS Our analysis so far have focused on the system with
homogeneous users. In this section, we will briefly discuss
In this section, we will consider the asymptotic properties of
the feedback bandwidth allocation scheme in heterogeneous
the feedback bandwidth allocation problem in the two limiting
user scenarios.
cases of very high and very low SNR, respectively. Based on
For heterogeneous users, the√path loss factors Ak ’s vary for
the analysis we will derive simpler bit allocation algorithms
different users. We can use Ak h̃k to replace the original
for the two different SNR regimes.
h̃k in our earlier derivations. The rest of our solutions can
be directly modified. For brevity, we only provide the final
A. Efficient Allocation for Asymptotically High SNR modifications. Take Algorithm 1 for example, we modify the
We first analyze the allocation problem for asymptotically algorithm for heterogeneous users by recalculating Δk in (17)
high SNR by replacing ρ → ∞ in (19). Thus, the optimization as follows
 
problem can be rewritten as
het γ̂k
N   Δk (Bk ) = log 1 + Bk +1
γ̂k Bk
1/(Ak ρ) + (M − 1)2− M −1
max log 1 + 2 M −1
 
Bk ,k=1,··· ,M M −1 γ̂k
k=1
M   − log 1 + (23)
 1 Bk
1/(Ak ρ) + (M − 1)2− M −1
Bk

+ log 1 + 2 M −1
M −1 where the value of γ̂k is re-defined, for heterogeneous users,
k=N +1
M
 as
subject to : Bk ≤ BT . (20)  −1
H H M −1 1
k=1 γ̂k = 1 − H1 H1 H1 + D+ I H1 (24)
M Ak P
Because 0 < γ̂k ≤ 1, any additional bit allocated to Bk
for (k = N + 1, · · · , M ) will generate more contribution where H1 follows the same definition in (36) and D is a
to the objective function of (20). Therefore, the optimal diagonal matrix defined in (38). Similarly, we can also modify
allocation scheme asymptotically in this case is to equally other proposed algorithms for heterogeneous users.

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XU et al.: LIMITED FEEDBACK DESIGN FOR MIMO BROADCAST CHANNELS WITH ARQ MECHANISM 2137

Note that these algorithms are generalized to the hetero-

geneous user case for user retransmissions, but do not apply
to the 1st transmission phase when all users transmit their
new data for the first time. To deal with this problem, our
previous work in [23] studied the optimized feedback band-
width allocation problem for a heterogeneous user population
without ARQ. Here we have extended our new feedback
bandwidth allocation to the heterogeneous user case with ARQ
capabilities.

VI. P ERFORMANCE T EST AND S IMULATION R ESULTS

To illustrate the effect of our limited feedback design on
the sum capacity for the system with ARQ retransmissions,
we tested the performance over a MIMO BC with a 4-antenna
BS and 4 single-antenna users. We compare the conventional
equal quantization bits allocation scheme (labeled in figures Fig. 2. Sum capacity for the system where a single user among all retransmits
as “Equal”) with our proposed adaptive allocation scheme its data for one time.
(labeled as “Adapt.”). Moreover, we also tested the efficient
allocation schemes for asymptotic SNR regimes. Note that
codebooks used in our simulation is obtained by using the
conventional Lloyd’s algorithm for vector quantization [20].

A. Numerical Examples
We first show in Table I some numerical examples of
the proposed adaptive CSI bandwidth allocation scheme. The
number of CSI feedback bits for each user is initialized to
8 bits/mobile. The user under the first transmission of its
new data is configured with the corresponding γ̂ = 1, and
the adaptive allocation examples under different SNRs are
given in this table. Moreover, the numerical examples for the
system with both one single-user retransmission and two-user
retransmission are provided.
From the numerical example at low SNR, it can be seen
that the final CSI feedback bits are almost equally distributed
across users whether or not the users are in the first transmis-
sion phase or the retransmission phase. However, as the SNR
increases, this phenomenon changes. At high SNR regime,
the available quantization bandwidth is allocated to only the
users which do not require retransmissions. This coincides
with our asymptotic SNR analysis in Section IV. Moreover,
for any fixed SNR, it can be found in Table I that the
determined allocation scheme also changes according to the
(re)transmission counter L. When the retransmission counters
for some users increase, less feedback bits are allocated
to these retransmission users for their CSI feedback. This
indicates that it could be a waste to assign CSI feedback
bits to the user with many retransmission times. We will now
provide more Monte-Carlo simulation results in addition to
the numerical results.
B. Single-Retransmission Scenario
The proposed scheme optimizes the sum capacity for ARQ
systems by adaptively allocating the quantization bits to users.
To focus on the adaptive allocation performance with retrans-
mission, we first assume in Fig. 2 that a single user among
all will always transmit its data stream twice (each new data
with one retransmission) regardless of whether the packet is
Fig. 3. Sum capacity for the system where two users among all retransmit
their data for one time.
correctly received or not during the 1st transmissions. The
results in Fig. 2 compare the sum capacity for retransmission
with the equal quantization bit allocation scheme and our pro-
posed allocation scheme. Two different system configurations
with average B = 4 bits/mobile per time-slot and B = 8
bits/mobile per time-slot are tested in our simulation. Note
that to exactly illustrate the performance gain of our proposed
adaptive allocation scheme, we show in these figures the sum
capacity during the 1st transmission and the 2nd transmission
(1st retransmission for the retransmission user), respectively.
The sum capacity shown for the 2nd transmission, i.e., (t + 2)
time slot, is the overall mutual information of the transmitted
data for all users during both the time slots (t+ 1) and (t+ 2).
From this simulation, it can be seen that our proposed
adaptive allocation scheme outperforms the equal allocation
scheme for retransmission cases, especially for growing SNR.
Although the performance gain obtained by our scheme in
the system with B = 4 is modest, the advantage of our
scheme becomes more evident when the average number of
available quantization bits for each user grows to B = 8. This
is intuitively reasonable because of the enlarged optimization

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2138 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 8, NO. 4, APRIL 2009

TABLE I
N UMERICAL E XAMPLES OF A DAPTIVE Q UANTIZATION D ESIGN

single-user retransmission case multi-user retransmission case

SNR time-slot
(γ̂1 , γ̂2 , γ̂3 , γ̂4 ) (B1 , B2 , B3 , B4 ) (γ̂1 , γ̂2 , γ̂3 , γ̂4 ) (B1 , B2 , B3 , B4 )

t+0 (1, 1, 1, 1) (8, 8, 8, 8) (1, 1, 1, 1) (8, 8, 8, 8)

2 dB t+1 (0.8973, 1, 1, 1) (8, 8, 8, 8) (0.9357, 0.9557, 1, 1) (8, 8, 8, 8)
t+2 (0.5174, 1, 1, 1) (5, 9, 9, 9) (0.5730, 0.6705, 1, 1) (7, 7, 9, 9)

t+0 (1, 1, 1, 1) (8, 8, 8, 8) (1, 1, 1, 1) (8, 8, 8, 8)

10 dB t+1 (0.8902, 1, 1, 1) (5, 9, 9, 9) (0.9399, 0.8955, 1, 1) (8, 6, 9, 9)
t+2 (0.7534, 1, 1, 1) (2, 10, 10, 10) (0.5183, 0.3481, 1, 1) (7, 1, 12, 12)

t+0 (1, 1, 1, 1) (8, 8, 8, 8) (1, 1, 1, 1) (8, 8, 8, 8)

16 dB t+1 (0.6537, 1, 1, 1) (1, 11, 10, 10) (0.4331, 0.8212, 1, 1) (1, 1, 15, 15)
t+2 (0.4703, 1, 1, 1) (1, 11, 10, 10) (0.3976, 0.6941, 1, 1) (1, 1, 15, 15)

space when the total number of available quantization bits

becomes larger.
Moreover, in Fig. 3, a system where two users among
all always transmit their packets twice is tested. Similar
observations as stated above can be obtained. Compared with
the results for single-user retransmission in Fig. 2, a better
performance gain is achieved by using our adaptive allocation
scheme.

C. Multiple-Retransmission Scenario
Considering more ARQ retransmissions, two users are
assumed to always transmit its data three times in Fig. 4.
Allocations based on asymptotic analysis are tested in com-
parison. From the results, it can been seen that the sum
capacity obtained by the simplified allocation scheme for high
SNRs nearly matches that obtained by the more complex
adaptive allocation scheme in Algorithm 2. On the other hand,
at low SNRs, equal allocation scheme is shown to achieve
the same performance as our adaptive scheme under the low
SNR regime. Thus, the effectiveness of our allocation schemes
under asymptotic SNR analysis is verified by our results.
It is important to note that in Fig. 4 the number of retrans-
missions for the two ARQ users are assumed to be the same
during each time-slot, even though our algorithm is designed
without this constraint. Furthermore, in Fig. 4, we focus on the
sum capacity after the three attempts by the ARQ users. As the
results show, when the number of transmissions increases, the
performance gain obtained by the adaptive allocation becomes
larger as when compared against equal bandwidth allocation.
D. More Practical Retransmission Scenario
In the above simulations, we assume that the users will
always retransmit their data regardless of the channel condi-
tions of users. However, in practical applications, the request
of retransmission depends on both the channel quality of
users and the required amount of information during the
current transmission time-slot. Therefore in the following
simulation, we test the system with a capacity-based criterion
for determining the data retransmissions of users. Given a
Fig. 4. Sum capacity for the system where two user among all are with
multiple retransmissions (retransmit their data twice in our simulation).
predetermined threshold Rth , any user with its instantaneous
achievable capacity lower than Rth will retransmit its data.
Moreover, the maximum number of transmission times for
the same data is limited to L ≤ 3. Note that with this system
configuration, the maximum number of allocated quantization
bits to a user k may be set to Bk = 29 bits/mobile per time-
slot (For example, B1 = B2 = B3 = 1 and B4 = 29).
However, it is computationally challenging to use computer
simulations to test the finite-rate feedback system for B
larger than 20. The same difficulty is also shown in [19]
even for systems with random vector quantization without a
well-defined codebook. To make this problem tractable and
for implementation simplicity, we further constrain that the
maximum available number of quantization bits for any user
be limited to 20 bits per time-slot. No more quantization bits
will be further allocated to the users with its current Bk = 20.
First, Fig. 5 shows the cumulative density functions of
the single-user capacity for the system with fixed Bk = 8
bits/mobile per time-slot for each user. In our ARQ simula-
tions, we set different values of the capacity threshold Rth
for users according to different SNR values. For instance, in
Fig. 6, F (Rth ) = 0.6 indicates that the capacity threshold Rth

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XU et al.: LIMITED FEEDBACK DESIGN FOR MIMO BROADCAST CHANNELS WITH ARQ MECHANISM 2139

0.9
Cumulative desity function F(x)

0.8

0.7

0.6
SNR (dB) :
0.5 [0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20]
0.4

0.3

0.2

0.1
M = 4, B = 8 bits/mobile
0
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5 5
Single−user capacity (bits/s/Hz)
Fig. 7. Sum capacity comparison versus different CDFs of capacity
thresholds.
Fig. 5. The cumulative density function of a single-user channel capacity in
our system without HARQ. The number of quantization bits for each user is
set to be B = 8 bits/mobile per time-slot.

Fig. 8. Sum capacity comparison in a probability-based ARQ mechanism.

Fig. 6. Sum capacity comparison versus different SNRs.

is determined by setting the CDF F (Rth ) in Fig. 5 equal to
0.6 which depends on the system configuration of SNR.
Fig. 6 compares the ergodic sum capacity with different
quantization bandwidth allocation schemes. We test the system
with two configurations of the capacity threshold: F (Rth ) =
0.6 and F (Rth ) = 0.9. For the system with larger threshold,
i.e., F (Rth ) = 0.9, the achieved ergodic sum capacity is
smaller than that with F (Rth ) = 0.6 because more retransmis-
sions are required under the larger threshold. Of course, the
proposed adaptive quantization bandwidth allocation scheme
provides more performance gain in this case because the
proposed scheme is designed to improve the performance
under ARQ. Moreover, the results verify our earlier conclusion
that equal quantization bandwidth allocation achieves almost
the same performance as the adaptive allocation scheme for
low SNRs.
Fig. 7 shows the capacity gain with the proposed adaptive
method versus different Rth . Since the adaptive allocation
method provides little performance gain at low SNRs, we
only provide the comparison results in this figure under
moderate and high values of SNR = 12 dB and SNR = 20
dB. The conclusion from this comparison coincides with our
earlier simulation results. The performance gain obtained by
the proposed method becomes more pronounced when SNR
increases or when the capacity threshold grows larger.
Finally in Fig. 8, we also tested our proposed scheme
in a probability-based ARQ mechanism. Different from the
above capacity-threshold-based ARQ mechanism, each user
requests a retransmission with a probability determined by its
instantaneous SINR. We assume maximum ratio combining
(MRC) is utilized at the receiver to jointly detect the data
transmitted during multiple (re)transmissions. Therefore, the
total received instantaneous SINR of the symbols (currently
received symbol and the previous received symbols of the
same data) by performing MRC is sum of the SINR of
each individual received symbol [21]. Accordingly, to test the
performance of a user that executes its l−th (re)transmission,
the cumulative SINR used for ldetermining the retransmission
probability is computed as i=1 SINR(i) where SINR(i) is
the SINR of the received signal at the i−th (re)transmission.
The retransmission probability is given by the frame-error-rate

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2140 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 8, NO. 4, APRIL 2009

(FER) which can be approximated by [22] we have the results in (30) which is obtained by using
−b·SINR c the Schur complement formula for determinant. Subsequently
Pre = 1 − (1 − ae ) (25) from (28) and (30), the mutual information can be given by
in which the parameters a, b, and c are determined by the (31).
coding scheme, the modulation type, and the number of Finally, we give the following definitions for representation
symbols per transmission packet, respectively. In this figure, simplicity and then obtain (8).
the results for two different combinations of these parameters α = log det(R−1 (32)
w̃,11 ),
are provided and similar observations can be made. 
β = log det ρH1 HH 1 + Rw̃,11 , (33)
 −1
VII. C ONCLUSIONS 1
γ = 1 − HH1 H 1 H H
1 + R w̃,11 H1 . (34)
In this work, we investigate the feedback bit allocation ρ
scheme for multiuser MIMO systems equipped with ARQ. By Note that the three parameters α, β, and γ are functions of the
limiting the total feedback bandwidth, the proposed method channel and beamformer information during only the previous
optimizes the feedback bit allocation for different users ac- (L − 1) time-slots. Therefore, before the transmission at the
cording to their current and previous transmission states. Our L−th time-slot, the three parameters are predetermined even
results show that the ergodic sum capacity can be improved though that we cannot obtain the exact values of them at the
by allocating more feedback bits to the users during their BS because of limited feedback.
first data transmissions. While for the users retransmitting the
same packet multiple times, it could be wasteful to assign A PPENDIX B
bits for their CSI feedback. We then extend the works to A PPROXIMATION OF γ
asymptotic SNR regimes. Our analysis shows that equal feed-
Since only the quantized channel information is available
back bandwidth allocation is nearly optimal for asymptotically
at the BS, we first approximate the matrix H1 by
low SNRs. On the other hand, when SNR is asymptotically √
high, it is better to allocate the bandwidth only to users in H1 = M H1 (35)
their first transmission phase. Finally, we show that the newly
proposed bit allocation scheme outperforms the conventional where M = E{|h̃|2 } is the average channel power gain and
equal bit allocation scheme under limited feedback bandwidth H1 is defined by
constraint. ⎡ ⎤
hH
1,1 f1,1
⎢ h1,2 f1,2 ⎥
H
⎢ ⎥
A PPENDIX A H1 = ⎢ .. ⎥. (36)
⎣ . ⎦
T HE M UTUAL I NFORMATION OF R ETRANSMISSION U SERS
hH
1,L−1 f1,L−1
We begin with the calculation of the correlation matrix
below Note that the matrix H1 can be calculated by using only the
⎡ H 2 ⎤ quantized channel information h·,· of users which is known
j=1 |h̃1,1 fj,1 | 0 ··· 0
⎢ .. .. ⎥ at the BS. Further, without the full channel information of
⎢ 0 . . ⎥ users, the diagonal entries of Rw̃,11 cannot be evaluated at
⎢
Rw̃w̃ =ρ ⎢ ⎥
.. . ⎥ the BS. Therefore, the expectation of the entries are utilized to
⎣ . . . 0 ⎦
 H 2 approximate the matrix Rw̃,11 , and thusthe j−th diagonal en- 
0 ··· 0 j=1 |h̃1,L fj,L | B
P (M−1) − M1,j
+ IL tries of the approximation is given by M 2 −1 +1
  where B1,j denotes the number of quantization bits for the
Rw̃,11 0
  H 2 (26) retransmission user 1 at the j−th time-slot.
0 ρ j=1 |h̃1,L fj,L | +1
Finally, by substituting the above approximations into (34),
and the value of γ can be approximated at the BS by
Ryy = ρHHH + Rw̃w̃ . (27)  −1
H H M −1 1
γ̂ = 1 − H1 H1 H1 + D+ I H1 (37)
By substituting this into (7), we rewrite the mutual information M P
by
where ! "
B B1,L−1
I(y1 , x1,1 ) = log det(R−1
w̃w̃ ) + log det(Ryy ) D  diag 2 − M1,1
−1 ,··· ,2 − M −1 (38)
⎛ ⎞

= log det(R−1
w̃,11 ) − log
⎝1 + ρ |h̃H
1,L fj,L |
2⎠ is a diagonal matrix.
j=1

+ log det(ρHHH + Rw̃w̃ ). (28) R EFERENCES

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1,L f1,L Commun., vol. 6, pp. 311–335, Mar. 1998.

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XU et al.: LIMITED FEEDBACK DESIGN FOR MIMO BROADCAST CHANNELS WITH ARQ MECHANISM
#
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2141
$
H h̃
ρf1,L 1,L H1

H
1 + ρ|h̃H
1,L f 1,L | 2+ρ H
j=1 |h̃1,L fj,L |
2
 −1
|h̃H
1,L fj,L |
2
−ρ 2
|h̃H 2 H
1,L f1,L | H1 ρH1 HH
1 + Rw̃,11 H1 ⎠ (30)
    −1  
|h̃H 2
1 1,L f1,L |
1+ 1 − HH
1 H1 HH
1 + Rw̃,11 H1  H
. (31)
ρ 1/ρ + j=1 |h̃1,L fj,L |2
[23] W. Xu, C. Zhao, and Z. Ding, “Quantized feedback optimization for
multi-antenna systems with heterogeneous users,” submitted.
Wei Xu (S’07) received the B.S. and M.S. de-
grees in electrical engineering in 2003 and 2006,
respectively. He is currently a Ph.D. student in the
National Mobile Communications Research Lab..
All from Southeast University, Nanjing, China. His
research interest spans the fields of information
theory and wireless communications, with specific
interests in multi-antenna and multi-user channels,
dynamic resource allocations.
Chunming Zhao (M’93) received the B.S. and
M.S. degrees from Nanjing Institute of Posts and
Telecommunications, in 1982 and 1984 respectively.
In 1993, he received his Ph.D. degree from the De-
partment of Electrical and Electronic Engineering,
University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. He has been
a Postdoctoral Researcher at National Mobile Com-
munications Research Lab., Southeast University,
where he is currently a professor and vice director
of the Lab. He has managed several key projects
of Chinese Communications High Tech. Program
and was awarded as “excellent researcher” form Ministry of Science and
Technology, China. His research interests include communication theory,
coding/decoding algorithms, mobile communication, adaptive filtering and
VLSI design.
Zhi Ding (S’88-M’90-SM’95-F’03) is Professor of
Electrical of Computer Engineering at the University
of California, Davis. He received his Ph.D. degree
in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in
1990. From 1990 to 2000, he was a faculty member
first at Auburn University and, later, at University of
Iowa. Prof. Ding has held visiting positions in Aus-
tralian National University, Hong Kong University
of Science and Technology, NASA Lewis Research
Center and USAF Wright Laboratory. Prof. Ding has
active collaboration with researchers from several
countries and regions including Australia, China, Japan, Canada, Taiwan,
Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong. He is also a visiting Changjiang Chair
professor of Southeast University in Nanjing, China.
Dr. Ding is a Fellow of IEEE and has been an active member of IEEE,
serving on technical programs of several workshops and conferences. He was
associate editor for IEEE T RANSACTIONS ON S IGNAL P ROCESSING from
1994–1997, 2001–2004, and associate editor of IEEE S IGNAL P ROCESSING
L ETTERS in 2002–2005. He was a member of technical committee on
Statistical Signal and Array Processing and member of technical committee
on Signal Processing for Communications (1994-2003). Professor Ding was
the Technical Program Chair of 2006 IEEE Globecom.