Limited feedback beamforming systems for dual-polarized MIMO channels

Dual-polarized multiple-input multiple-output (MI-MO) antenna systems, where the antennas are grouped in pairs of orthogonally polarized antennas, are a spatially-efficient alternative to single polarized MIMO antenna systems. A limited feedback beamforming technique is proposed for dual-polarized MIMO channels where the receiver has perfect channel knowledge but the transmitter only receives partial information regarding the channel instantiation. The system employs an effective signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) distortion minimizing codebook to convey channel state information (CSI) in the form of beamforming direction. By investigating the average SNR performance of this system, an upper bound on the average SNR distortion is found as a weighted sum of two beamforming distortion metrics. The distortion minimization problem is solved by designing a concatenated codebook. Finally, we propose a codebook switching scheme exploiting the cross-polar discrimination (XPD) statistics. Simulations show that the proposed codebook switching scheme with an XPD dependent concatenated codebook has the ability to adapt to dual-polarized channels.