An Adaptive Feedback Method with Channel Change
Indication for Band AMC in a Femto Cell
Changyoun Kim, Jaeki Lee, Changhyun Nam, Jangho Yoon, and Hwang Soo Lee
Division of Electrical Engineering, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, KAIST
Daejeon, Korea
{cykim83, ljk, chang, icespy}@mcl.kaist.ac.kr, hwanglee@ee.kaist.ac.kr
Abstract— The band adaptive modulation and coding (band
AMC) scheme is used in orthogonal frequency division multiple
access (OFDMA) systems to increase mobile communication
system throughput, however, an amount of feedback overhead
degrades uplink system performance. In this paper, we propose
an adaptive feedback method that can significantly reduce the
amount of channel feedback information when a femto base
station (BS) and mobile stations (MS) communicate in the band
AMC mode. Since the channel variation of the MS in the femto
cell is relatively small, instead of informing the femto BS of the
channel quality information (CQI) periodically, MSs only send
CQI feedback to the femto BS when channel condition changes
above a threshold. Simulation results show that the proposed
scheme can reduce feedback overhead up to 70 % without
resulting in system throughput degradation compared to the
conventional best-M feedback scheme.
Keywords-band AMC; channel change indication; feedback;
femto cell; indoor; OFMDA; pico cell; small cell
I. INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, users of wireless communication systems want
high data rate services to download and upload high-capacity
data. Also, they want to get service whenever or wherever they
are. To support these users’ needs, wireless transmission
technologies such as orthogonal frequency division multiple
access (OFDMA) and Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO)
have been researched widely.
Recently, a femto cell has also been researched to extend
indoor cell coverage and meet users’ needs. The femto cell is a
small base station (BS) which will be installed at home or in an
office to increase cell coverage for indoor environment. The
femto cell can provide high-capacity data services to users in
indoor environment with low price by using the licensed band.
The cell coverage of the femto cell is around 10m. The femto
cell was approved as a work item of 3rd Generation Partnership
Project 2 (3GPP2). Also, 3GPP names the femto cell as Home
Node B or Home eNodeB, and it is standardizing the femto
cell. There is mention about the femto cell in IEEE 802.16m
system requirement document, and it has been discussed for
standardization. Also, in ongoing standardization activities
such as 3GPP long term evolution advanced (LTE-A) and
3GPP2 ultra mobile broadband evolution (UMB evolution) for
IMT-Advanced system, the femto cell is one of the major
This work was supported in part by the IT R&D program of MKE/IITA
under Contract number 2005-S-609-04 in Korea and by Samsung Electronics.
978-1-4244-2517-4/09/$20.00 ©2009 IEEE
candidate technologies that can substitute for the wireless local
area network (WLAN) for indoor environment.
In OFDMA system, the overall system throughput can be
increased by the band adaptive modulation and coding (band
AMC) [1]. However, the channel quality information (CQI)
feedback from each mobile station (MS) is required to employ
band AMC. Due to the feedback overhead, the uplink system
performance is degraded. Especially, since the number of BS
antennas and MS antennas increase in MIMO-OFDMA
system, CQI feedback is required for each stream when MIMO
is used as spatial multiplexing; thus, feedback overhead
increases.
To reduce feedback overhead, a lot of research has been
conducted. Ref. [2] proposed a scheme, which varies feedback
period based on MS’s velocity. According to [3], the MS’s
velocity can be measured, but it is difficult to adopt velocity
measuring algorithm in real wireless communication systems
due to complexity and accuracy problem. In [4], MSs feedback
average value of CQI to the BS, and the BS allocates resources
for sub-band CQI to some MSs which have high average value.
When many MSs operate in the band AMC mode, the method
presented in [4] is well-performed. However, it did not show
tremendous enhancement, when few MSs operate in the band
AMC mode like femto cell.
In [5]-[7], opportunistic feedback has been researched to
reduce feedback overhead. Only MS, which has higher CQI
than threshold value, feedbacks CQI to the BS. Since
opportunistic feedback is a contention-based feedback, it is
possible that two or more MSs feedback CQI through the same
resource. Since channel of each MS is not predictable, it is
difficult to determine how many CQI feedback channels are
required.
In [8], analog feedback, which just uses one OFDMA
symbol for CQI, was researched. Analog feedback can reduce
feedback overhead, but the dynamic range is larger than that of
quantized feedback such as best-M feedback and opportunistic
feedback, so it requires a nice RF transmitter.
Especially, since ongoing standardization activities for
IMT-Advanced system are considering contiguous or non-
contiguous bandwidth with 20 MHz or more or less, a simple
and cost-efficient channel feedback scheme for indoor
environment is required. In this paper, we propose a simple
adaptive feedback method for band AMC in the femto cell

Figure 1.The basic concept of a femtocell
without above mentioned problems. Channel variation of MSs
in the femto cell is small since users move slowly and some
users do not move in offices or home. By exploiting this
channel characteristic of the femto cell, MSs does not feedback
CQI periodically. Instead, MSs periodically send channel
change indication. When channel variation of the MS is bigger
than a threshold value, the BS requests the MS to send CQI
feedback. Proposed scheme can reduce feedback overhead up
to 70% in indoor environment.
This paper is organized as follows: Section II presents the
basic introduction of femto cell. Section III introduces the
system model. An adaptive feedback scheme with channel
change indication is proposed in section IV. The simulation
result is given in section V, followed by the conclusions in
section VI.
II. FEMTO CELL
The basic concept of a femto cell is depicted in Fig. 1[9].
The femto cell, which is usually connected to the IP backbone,
provides wireless communication service to users. As depicted
in Fig. 1, the femto cell can be deployed in home environment
to communicate with a small number of users. However, femto
cell can also be deployed in dense areas such as office and
public places to give wireless communication services to a
large number of subscribers.
The femto cell is more competitive than other wireless
communication systems such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth because
the small number of femto cell users will use an entire licensed
band in indoor environment [10]. However, to commercialize
and standardize the femto cell, some problems should be
solved. One main problem is the interference between a macro
cell and the femto cell; also, the interference between femto
cells could be problem. In addition, the procedure of handover
from the macro cell to the femto cell should be defined.
Moreover, optimized wireless communication technologies
for indoor environments can be applied to the femto cell due to
the fact that the femto cell has different characteristics
compared to the macro cell. Users in the femto cell usually
move more slowly than users in the macro cell do.
Furthermore, some users in the femtocell do not move, so the
channel variation due to the Doppler shift is negligible [11].
Because of these users’ characteristics, optimized
communication method for indoor environments is able to be
used in the femto cell. For example, the femto cell system
performance can be similar to the macro cell system
performance with small amount of feedback because the users
Figure 2. A system model of downlink OFDMA systems
in the femto cell move slowly. From this fact, a simple
adaptive feedback method in the femto cell is proposed in this
paper.
III. SYSTEM MODEL
A system model of downlink OFDMA system with I MSs
is depicted in Fig 2. The entire channel is divided into L sub-
bands. It is assumed that channel is not changed during one
frame duration.
Each MS measures carrier-to-interference-and-noise ratio
(CINR) at every frame, and they feedback best-M sub-bands
among L sub-bands to the BS when resources are allocated to
MSs for feedback.
Gi (t ) = {g i ,l1 (t ), gi ,l2 (t )," , g i ,lM (t )} (1)
where gi ,ls (t ) is CINR of lsth sub-band of MS i at time t, and
each MS feedbacks Gi(t) to the BS.
To provide fairness to MSs, proportional fair (PF)
scheduler is employed to allocate sub-bands to users.
According to [12], the PF scheduler allocates lth sub-band to a
MS which satisfy below criterion at time t.
ri ,l (t )
P (l , t ) = arg max i (1 + )
(T − 1) Ri (t − 1)
()
where ri,l(t) is the instantaneous transmittable data rate of lth
sub-band of user i. Ri(t-1) is the average rate of MS i at the
previous frame, and T is the average window size.
∑ ri,l
(T − 1) Ri (t − 1) l∈Si
Ri (t ) = + (3)
T T
where Si is the set of sub-bands allocated to MS i.
Since the PF scheduler uses transmittable data rate and each
MS feedbacks CINR, the BS should calculate the transmittable
data rate based on feedback CINR information from MSs.
Capacity is used as the transmittable data rate, and it is
expressed as follows.
ri ,ls (t ) = log 2 (1 + gi ,ls (t )) (4)
Also, it is assumed that no error occurs in uplink feedback
channel.
 IV. PROPOSED SCHEME
Users in the femto cell relatively move slowly and they
sometimes do not move; therefore, the channel variation
between the BS and MSs is relatively small. The channel
variation is comparatively small in the femto cell, so the
current channel condition is not largely different from the
previous CQI. Thus, the band AMC scheme can be widely
implemented in the femto cell to increase system throughput
since previous CQI is still available next frame.
For the same reason, if every the MS, which operates in the
band AMC mode, periodically feedbacks CQI, an amount of
feedback overhead will become tremendous. A method that
reduces the feedback overhead by using channel change
indication in the femto cell is proposed in this paper. The
message sequence chart between BS and MS, and the channel
change indication algorithm of MS are described as follows.

A. Message Sequence Chart between BS and MS

It is assumed that the BS cannot measure the velocity of
each MS. In the proposed scheme, MSs, which operate in band
AMC mode, do not periodically send CQI. Instead, MSs just
send indication information whether the channel is changed or
not from the previous value. The message sequence chart is
depicted in Fig. 3.
MSs calculate the CINR of each sub-band periodically.
Figure 3. Message sequence chart between BS and MS
And then, it checks if the channel condition is changed or not,
and it sends feedback indication flag to the BS. Based on
feedback indication flag from MSs, the BS allocates uplink
resources for the best-M feedback to the MSs which sent
indication flag with “1”. According to the current feedback
CQI from the MSs which sent indication flag with “1” and the
previous CQI value from the other MSs, the BS sends
downlink resource allocation information to MSs.

B. Channel Change Indication algorithm of MS

The algorithm for MS to feedback CQI is shown in Fig. 4.
Step 1: Each MS periodically measures and find best-M
sub-bands like (1).
Step 2: Each MS checks whether set of best-M sub-bands is
changed or not.

L(t p ) = {l1 , l2 ," , lM }, L(t ) = {l1' , l '2 ," , l ' M }

(5)
Check L(t p ) = L(t ) or L(t p ) ≠ L(t )

where L(tp) is the set of indices of best-M sub-bands when a

MS lastly feedbacked CQI, and L(t) is the set of indices of
best-M sub-bands at current frame.
Step 3: If the set of indices of best-M sub-bands is changed,
the MS concludes that channel condition is changed, so it
notifies the BS that channel is changed. Otherwise, the MS
checks that the variation of CINR of best-M sub-bands. The
variation of CINR is as follows.

Figure 4. Channel change indication algorithm of MS |CINRl,last - CINRl,current| (6)

 Proposed
TABLE I. SIMULATION ENVIRONMENTS 350000 Conventional best-M
Content Description

Feedback Overhead(bits/s)
300000

Wireless channel Indoor hot spot

250000
FFT size 1024
Number of data sub-carriers 768 200000

Number of sub-bands 12 150000

Number of OFDM symbols
47
per one frame 100000

Center frequency 2.5GHz 50000

Bandwidth 10MHz
0
One frame duration 5ms 0 10 20 30 40 50

Number of MSs
Figure 6. Feedback overhead comparison between conventional best-M
and the proposed scheme

Proposed
Figure 5. CQI feedback message 3.0
Conventional best-M

where CINRl,last is CINR of lth sub-band of best-M sub-

Throughput(bit/s/Hz)
2.5
bands when the MS lastly sent best-M feedback, and
CINRl,current is CINR of lth sub-band of best-M sub-bands of
current frame. If at least CINR variation of one sub-band is 2.0

above threshold value, K, the MS concludes that channel

condition is changed, so it informs the BS that channel is
changed. Based on the value of K, the frequency of best-M 1.5

CQI feedback varies. When K is small, many best-M CQI

feedbacks are required. However, with large K, relatively
small number of best-M CQI feedback is required, but
system performance degrades due to incorrect channel
information. For this reason, setting the optimal K value is
important.
Step 4: The BS allocates uplink resources to MSs, which
inform the BS that channel is changed, to get best-M CQI
feedback.
Step 5: The MSs, which get the resources to feedback best-
M CQI, inform the BS of best-M sub-bands CQI.
Similarly, [13] uses the band AMC differential CINR
feedback, which is that the MS sends the differential CINR of
M selected sub-bands through its fast-feedback channel. Since
the band AMC differential CINR feedback sends feedback
information through fast feedback channel, it uses 8 sub-
carriers per each sub-band. Thus, because ongoing
standardization activities for IMT-Advanced system consider
wider bandwidth than current system, CQI of more sub-bands
may be required for the band AMC, which increases more fast-
feedback channels. However, if fast-feedback channel is used
in the proposed scheme, the proposed scheme only uses one
fast-feedback channel for channel change indication, so
feedback overhead does not increase in indoor environments.
In this paper, we assume that MSs use channel change
indication flag, which consists of 1 bit, to inform about whether
channel is changed or not. If channel condition is changed, the
channel change indication flag is set as “1”. Otherwise, it is set
as “0”.
1.0
0 10 20 30 40 50
Number of MSs
Figure 7. Downlink channel throughput comparison between conventional
best-M feedback and the proposed method
V. SIMULATION RESULTS
A. Simluation Environments
Simulation environments are given in Table 1. Channel
model is indoor hot spot model of IEEE 802.16m evaluation
methodology document (EMD) [14]. Indoor hot spot model is
used to simulate for the case that a large number of MSs are
operating in a femtocell. Thus, we perform the simulation
according to the number of MSs from 5 up to 50. The
distribution of velocity of MSs also follows IEEE 802.16m
EMD. According to the EMD, 20 percent of MSs move at
3km/h, and 80 percent of MSs do not move.
In conventional best-M feedback, since the BS does not
know velocity of each MS, it should require periodic CQI to
every MS. The period of best-M feedback should be set based
on the worst case – the possible biggest channel variation. The
worst channel variation case of the femto cell is the channel
variation of MSs moving at 3km/h. However, when MSs move
3km/h or slower, channel is not changed significantly every
frame. For this reason, it is not necessary to feedback every
frame. Therefore, in this simulation, MSs feedback every two
frames to reduce feedback overhead. For fair comparison with
conventional scheme, MSs also informs the BS whether
channel is changed or not at every two frames. The message
sequence chart and the channel change indication algorithm of
MS follow Fig. 3 and Fig. 4, respectively. The threshold value,
K, is set as 1dB. It is assumed that 32 bits message is used for
best-4 CQI feedback. 32 bit message format is depicted in Fig.
5. As shown in Fig. 5, CQI feedback message consists of
BITMAP and CQI value. The number of bits of BITMAP and
CQI value follows [13].
To measure the channel throughput, the feedbacked CINR
value is used. In addition, PF scheduler is used to allocate
resources.
B. Simluation Results
In this sub-section, we will show the uplink feedback
overhead and downlink throughput of the proposed scheme
through simulation results.
In Fig. 6, the feedback overhead per second is depicted
according to the number of MSs in one femto cell. The amount
of feedback overhead increases as the number of MSs
operating in the band AMC mode increases. However, the
proposed scheme reduces feedback overhead even though the
number of MSs is small, since the BS allocates uplink
resources for CQI feedback to the MS which informs the BS
that channel is changed. The proposed scheme can reduce
feedback overhead up to 70% compared to best-M feedback
scheme. Even though we simulate the feedback overhead for
the case that the number of MSs is up to 50 because we also
consider indoor hot spot area, the proposed scheme can reduce
the feedback overhead regardless of the number of MSs in a
femto cell.
In uplink of the proposed scheme, fewer resources are
required to send feedback information to the BS, so more
resources can be used for uplink data transmission. Thus, the
uplink throughput degradation caused by feedback information
is reduced due to less feedback overhead.
Fig. 7 shows the downlink throughput based on feedbacked
CQI according to the number of MSs in one femto cell. When
the number of MSs in one femto cell increases, the downlink
throughput increases in both the proposed method and the best-
M feedback method because of multiuser diversity. Also, even
though MSs send less feedback information to the BS, the
downlink throughput is not degraded. Thus, we believe that the
proposed scheme is the method that reduces the feedback
overhead without degrading the downlink performance.
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper we propose a simple adaptive feedback
method with channel change indication flag for the band AMC
when the BS and MSs operate in the femto cell. Since users in
indoor move slowly or they do not move, the proposed method
reduces the feedback overhead up to 70% without resulting in
channel throughput degradation compared to conventional
best-M feedback. The proposed scheme does not require
velocity measuring algorithm. Also, in the proposed scheme,
since each MS uses dedicated feedback channel, the same
feedback resource is not used by two or more MSs.
However, in the proposed scheme, the BS requires
feedback about whether the channel is changed or not to the
MS which has the same channel condition. Since this feedback
is unnecessary, the research to reduce this feedback is required.
Also, it is required to develop the proposed scheme to be
proper for MIMO system.
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