Hybrid Limited Feedback in 5G Cellular Systems With Massive MIMO

Massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) is one of the promising technologies to address the growing capacity requirement in fifth-generation cellular systems. However, the massive MIMO deployed at base stations (BSs) or relay stations (RSs) brings new challenges on channel state information (CSI) feedback because of its large-scale complex channel matrix. In this paper, we propose a hybrid limited feedback with selective eigenvalue information (HLFSEI), which adopts the individual quantized feedback and the codebook-based feedback jointly. In HLFSEI, we feed back only selective eigenvalue elements for power allocation by individual quantized feedback and the precoding matrix by codebook-based feedback. Furthermore, we study the optimal feedback bit allocation of the aforementioned two feedback methods to minimize the throughput loss with the feedback-link capacity constraint. Specifically, the feedback bits are allocated according to the properties of the throughput loss in high- and low-signal-to-noise regimes. Both the BS–RS communications and the BS/RS–user-equipment communications in cellular systems are taken into consideration. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the proposed HLFSEI strategy by simulation and show its performance gain compared with conventional feedback strategies.