Power and Bit Allocation for Wireless OFDM Channels with Finite-Rate Feedback and Subcarrier Clustering

The study investigated the allocation of transmission power and bits for a point-to-point orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing channel assuming perfect channel information at the receiver, but imperfect channel information at the transmitter. Channel information was quantized at the receiver and was sent back to the transmitter via a finite-rate feedback channel. Based on limited feedback from the receiver, the corresponding transmitter adapted the power level and/or modulation across subcarriers. To reduce the amount of feedback, subcarriers were partitioned into different clusters and an on/off threshold-based power allocation was applied to subcarrier clusters. In addition, two options were proposed to interpolate a channel frequency response from a set of quantized channel gains and apply the optimal water-filling allocation or a greedy bit allocation based on channel interpolation. Proposed schemes with finite feedback rates were shown to perform close to the optimal allocation without a feedback-rate constraint. In the numerical example, channel capacity decreased about 6% from the optimum when one bit of feedback per subcarrier was used.