On Achievable Rate of User Selection for MIMO Broadcast Channels With Limited Feedback

We consider the block diagonalization (BD) and user selection based on limited feedback in multiple antenna broadcast channels. With limited feedback, due to the imperfect channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT), BD cannot completely eliminate multiuser interference, and the throughput is correspondingly lower than that achieved with perfect CSIT. Nevertheless, the achievable multiuser diversity gain can be the same, such that limited-feedback-based BD can achieve an optimal throughput growth as the number of users increases. To show this, we first propose a channel quality indicator (CQI) for user selection. The CQI is designed to accurately estimate an achievable rate of each user and is given by an expected rate, where the expectation is solely taken over precoding matrices which cannot be known at the feedback stage. With the proper CQI, user selection can benefit from a large number of users in the system. As a result, we show that the BD can achieve an asymptotically optimal growth in throughput with the proposed CQI, based solely on a finite-rate feedback of channel information.