Adaptive constellation rotation scheme for two-user fading MAC with quantized fade state feedback

Abstract

With no Channel State Information (CSI) at the users, transmission over the two-user Gaussian Multiple Access Channel with fading and finite constellation at the input, will have high error rates due to multiple access interference (MAI). However, perfect CSI at the users is an unrealistic assumption in the wireless scenario, as it would involve extremely large feedback overheads. In this paper we propose a scheme which removes the adverse effect of MAI using only quantized knowledge of fade state at the transmitters such that the associated overhead is nominal. One of the users rotates its constellation relative to the other without varying the transmit power to adapt to the existing channel conditions, in order to meet certain pre-determined minimum Euclidean distance requirement in the equivalent constellation at the destination. The optimal rotation scheme is described for the case when both the users use symmetric M-PSK constellations at the input, where M = 2^λ, λ being a positive integer. The strategy is illustrated by considering the example where both the users use QPSK signal sets at the input. The case when the users use PSK constellations of different sizes is also considered. It is shown that the proposed scheme has considerable better error performance compared to the conventional non-adaptive scheme, at the cost of a feedback overhead of just ⌈ log₂ (M²/8 - M/4 + 2)⌉ + 1 bits, for the M-PSK case.