Resource Allocation in MU-OFDM Cognitive Radio Systems with Partial Channel State Information

In wireless communications, the assumption that the transmitter has perfect channel state information (CSI) is often unreasonable, due to feedback delays, estimation errors, and quantization errors. In order to accurately assess system performance, a more careful analysis with imperfect CSI is needed. In this paper, the impact of partial CSI due to feedback delays in a multiuser Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MU-OFDM) cognitive radio (CR) system is investigated. The effect of partial CSI on the bit error rate (BER) is analyzed. A relationship between the transmit power and the number of bits loaded on a subcarrier is derived which takes into account the target BER requirement. With this relationship, existing resource allocation schemes which are based on perfect CSI being available can be applied when only partial CSI is available. Simulation results are provided to illustrate how the system performance degrades with increasingly poor CSI.