MISO Broadcast Channel under Unequal Link Coherence Times and Channel State Information

The broadcast channel may experience unequal link coherence times due to a number of factors including variation in node mobility or local scattering conditions. This means the block fading model for different links may have nonidentical block length, and the channel state information for the links may also not be identical. The faster the fading and the shorter the fading block length, the more often the link needs to be trained and estimated at the receiver, and the more likely that channel state information (CSI) is stale or unavailable at the transmitter. This paper investigates a MISO broadcast channel where some receivers experience longer coherence intervals and other receivers experience shorter coherence intervals and must estimate their receive-side CSI (CSIR) frequently. We consider a variety of transmit-side CSI (CSIT) conditions for the abovementioned model, including no CSIT, delayed CSIT, or hybrid CSIT. To investigate the degrees of freedom region, we employ interference alignment and beamforming along with a product superposition that allows simultaneous but noncontaminating transmission of pilots and data to different receivers. Outer bounds employ the extremal entropy inequality as well as a bounding of the performance of a discrete, memoryless, multiuser, multilevel broadcast channel. For several cases, inner and outer bounds are established that either partially meet, or the gap diminishes with increasing coherence times.