Transceiver Design for Multiple Antenna Communication Systems with Imperfect Channel State Information

Wireless communication links with multiple antennas at both the transmitter and the receiver sides, so-called multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems, are attracting much interest since they can significantly increase the capacity of band-limited wireless channels to meet the requirements of the future high data rate wireless communications. The treatment of channel state information (CSI) is critical in the design of MIMO systems. Accurate CSI at the transmitter is often not possible or may require high feedback rates, especially in multi-user scenarios. Herein, we consider the robust design of linear transceivers with imperfect CSI either at the transmitter or at both sides of the link. The framework considers the design problem where the imperfect CSI consists of a channel mean and an channel covariance matrix or, equivalently, a channel estimate and an estimation error covariance matrix. For single-user systems, the proposed robust transceiver designs are based on a general cost function of the average mean square errors. Under different CSI conditions, our robust designs exhibit a similar structure to the transceiver designs for perfect CSI, but with a different equivalent channel and/or noise covariance matrix. Utilizing majorization theory, the robust linear transceiver design can be readily solved by convex optimization approaches in practice. For multi-user systems, we consider both the communication link from the users to the access point (up-link) as well as the reverse link from the access point to the users (down-link). For the up-link channel, it is possible to optimally design robust linear transceivers minimizing the average sum mean square errors of all the data streams for the users. Our robust linear transceivers are designed either by reformulating the optimization problem as a semidefinite program or by extending the design of a single-user system in an iterative manner. Under certain channel conditions, we show that the up-link design problem can even be solved partly in a distributed fashion. For the down-link channel, a system with one receive antenna per user is considered. A robust system design is obtained by reducing the feedback load from all users to allow only a few selected users to feed back accurate CSI to the access point. We study the properties of four typical user selection algorithms in conjunction with beamforming that guarantee certain signalto-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) requirements under transmit power minimization. Specifically, we show that norm-based user selection is asymptotically optimal in the number of transmitter antennas and close-to-optimal in the number of users. Rooted in the practical significance of this result, a simpler down-link system design with reduced feedback requirements is proposed.