The Effect of Channel Estimation Error on the Throughput of Broadcast Channels

Abstract

In a broadcast channel in which one transmitter serves n receivers, the capacity region highly depends on the amount of channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter. Assuming that the transmitter knows the SNR of all the receivers, opportunistic strategy maximizes the throughput (sum-rate) of the system. It is usually assumed that CSI is accurate, however, evaluating the SNR is basically an estimation problem in the receiver which cannot be done without error. In this paper, we analyze the effect of the noisy estimation of SNR on the throughput of a broadcast channel. We propose a generalization of the opportunistic transmission in which the transmitter still sends to the user with the highest estimated SNR, but backs off on the transmit rate based on the variance of the estimation error. We obtain the optimum amount of back off and compute the throughput for our scheduling scheme. Clearly, the estimation can be improved by using a longer training phase; however, longer training would deteriorate the throughput. In the final part of the paper, we address this trade off and obtain the optimum training strategy that maximizes the throughput of the system.