A novel CQI-assisted sounding design for TDD LTE-Advanced system

In the long term evolution (LTE) time division duplex (TDD) systems, base stations use uplink sounding reference signals (SRSs) to estimate downlink channel state information (CSI) for downlink beamforming transmissions. Because SRSs sent by up to 8 users are multiplexed on the same time-frequency resources, there exist mutual interferences among these SRSs over fading channels. Thus this scheme inevitably impacts the estimation accuracy of CSI and thereby degrades the beamforming performance. In this paper, we propose a novel sounding scheme to improve the quality of CSI, in which according to the CQIs (channel quality indications) periodically reported by each user and the bandwidth requirement of each user, BS dynamically schedules each user to send SRSs only on the requisite bandwidth with best CQIs instead of on full bandwidth or specified sub-bandwidth as in the current LTE TDD systems. Simulations show that the proposed scheme obtains much better estimation accuracy than the current scheme for various frequency-selective and/or time-selective fading channels, and is robust to frequency selective channels. Therefore the proposed scheme is applicable to the uplink SRS design in LTE-Advanced and other MIMO-OFDM TDD systems.