Robust Transmit Eigen Beamforming Based on Imperfect Channel State Information

Transmit beamforming is a powerful technique for enhancing the performance and increasing the throughput of wireless communication systems that employ multiple antennas at the transmitter. A major drawback of most existing transmit beamforming techniques is that they require nearly perfect knowledge of the channel at the transmitter, which is typically not available in practice. Transmitter designs that address the imperfect channel state information (CSI) problem commonly use statistical models for the channel and/or mismatch between the presumed and actual transmitter CSI. Since these approaches are model based, they can suffer from mismodeling. In this paper, a more robust framework is proposed in which no statistical assumptions are made about the CSI mismatch or the channel. The goal is to design a transmitter that has the best performance under the worst-case CSI mismatch. The transmitter designed herein achieves this goal for all CSI mismatches below a certain threshold level. The proposed design combines beamforming along the eigenvectors of the (deterministic) autocorrelation of the channel matrix perceived by the transmitter and power loading across those beams. While the power-loading algorithm resembles conventional water-filling to some degree, it explicitly incorporates robustness to the CSI mismatch, and the water level can be determined in a simple systematic way.