Not Too Delayed CSIT Achieves the Optimal Degrees of Freedom

Channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) aids interference management in many communication systems. Due to channel state information (CSI) feedback delay and time-variation in the wireless channel, perfect CSIT is not realistic. In this paper, the CSI feedback delay-DoF gain trade-off is characterized for the multi-user vector broadcast channel. A major insight is that it is possible to achieve the optimal degrees of freedom (DoF) gain if the delay is less than a certain fraction of the channel coherence time. This precisely characterizes the intuition that a small delay should be negligeable. To show this, a new transmission method called space-time interference alignment is proposed, which actively exploits both the current and past CSI.