Outage-Efficient Downlink Transmission Without Transmit Channel State Information

Abstract: This paper investigates downlink transmission over a quasi-static fading Gaussian broadcast channel (BC), to model delay-sensitive applications over slowly time-varying fading channels. System performance is characterized by outage achievable rate regions. In contrast to most previous work, here the problem is studied under the key assumption that the transmitter only knows the probability distributions of the fading coefficients, but not their realizations. For scalar-input channels, two coding schemes are proposed. The first scheme is called blind dirty paper coding (B-DPC), which utilizes a robustness property of dirty paper coding to perform precoding at the transmitter. The second scheme is called statistical superposition coding (S-SC), in which each receiver adaptively performs successive decoding with the process statistically governed by the realized fading. Both B-DPC and S-SC schemes lead to the same outage achievable rate region, which always dominates that of time-sharing, irrespective of the particular fading distributions. The S-SC scheme can be extended to BCs with multiple transmit antennas.