On Opportunistic Power Control for Alamouti and SM MIMO Systems

Abstract

Transmit antenna diversity and single user spatial multiplexing have become attractive in practical systems, because they achieve performance gains without requiring sophisticated channel state information (CSI) feedback mechanisms. On the other hand, when fast and accurate CSI at the transmitter is available, opportunistic power control (OPC) is an attractive alternative to signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) target following approaches, because it maximizes throughput by taking advantage of fast channel variations. In this paper we examine the question whether OPC is worth the pain of obtaining fast CSI by evaluating the gains of OPC for the downlink of a system employing multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems with Alamouti and open loop spatial multiplexing (SM). We formulate the OPC problem as a throughput maximization task subject to power budget and fairness constraints. We solve this task by the Augmented Lagrangian Penalty Function and find that without fairness constraints, OPC in concert with SM provides superior throughput. With increasingly tight fairness constraints, Alamouti along with equal power allocation becomes a viable alternative to the SM OPC scheme. Both from fairness and throughput perspectives, Alamouti along with OPC is particularly efficient when adaptive MCS is employed and users with large differences in channel qualities have to share the total transmit power.