Performance Analysis of Simple Channel Feedback Schemes for a Practical OFDMA System

In this paper, we evaluate the tradeoff between the amount of uplink channel feedback information and the orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) downlink performance with opportunistic frequency-domain packet scheduling. Three candidate channel feedback schemes are investigated, including practical aspects, such as the effects of terminal measurement errors, bandwidth measurement granularity, quantization, and uplink signaling delays. The performance is evaluated by means of system-level simulations with detailed modeling of various radio resource-management algorithms, etc. Our results show that the optimal tradeoff between the channel feedback and the downlink OFDMA system performance depends on the radio channel frequency coherence bandwidth. We conclude that the so-called average best-M scheme is the most attractive channel feedback solution, where only the average channel quality for the best M subbands is reported, together with a bit mask identifying those subbands. The latter scheme only has a channel feedback word size in the range of 10-20 bits for the considered OFDMA system with 10-MHz bandwidth.